Enterprise Search: Dave Girouard on Taking Google to the Corporation

When it comes to making sense of the overwhelming volume of data that's been unleashed upon the world over the past ten years, no company has had more of an impact than Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. Anyone who had the misfortune of using Alta Vista as their primary search engine in the early 1990s can attest to that.

But as much as Google has insinuated itself into the very fabric of Internet culture, capturing consumer mindshare in leaps and bounds, the company has yet to offer much of value to corporations. In the same way that consumers were set adrift in a sea of endless information in the early days of the Web, enterprises are now drowning in data sets of their own. And the problem is only getting worse.

That's why Google has Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's budding enterprise business. Dave's job is pretty simple: apply to enterprise data the same revolutionary search technology that organized the Web. To do that, Google is working with business application vendors to make the data locked away inside various structured tables and proprietary software available to a simple, intuitive search engine. And in the process, Google is aiming to become the primary interface for all enterprise applications. Executive Editor Dan Briody spoke with Girouard about Google's ambitious plans. An edited version of their conversation follows.

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