Enterprise Search: Dave Girouard on Taking Google to the Corporation - ' Google'

So how are you going to make Google relevant to the enterprise?
The Google search appliance is the basic product for searching across all the network information inside your company. And in the new version we're adding what's called OneBox. OneBox refers to the fact that when you go to Google.com and submit a query, you sometimes get a special set of results inserted at the top of the search results.

An example would be if you typed in "weather San Francisco," you would get a five-day weather forecast inserted at the top of the results. Or if you typed in "United 10," you'd get flight information about a United flight. It's just very quick information access through what is, in effect, an über-command-line interface. And we think that could be a very powerful tool inside the enterprise.

So, for Google OneBox for Enterprise we went out and talked to a lot of business application vendors about making their information much more accessible through a simple search interface. For example, we talked to Oracle, Cognos, SAS Institute, Salesforce.com, Cisco and a few others. But essentially the idea is that just the same way you could look up a weather forecast on Google, you could easily tap into your Salesforce.com system and find out about a sales opportunity.

Will Google and Microsoft Live Happily Ever After? Click here to read more.

Wasn't the Google search appliance already able to search those applications?
Yeah, it was, but if you think about general search, it's about getting a bunch of information back and relevancy ranking it into documents. So if you want to find a phone number of an employee, do you really want a document-level search where you have to look through three and four documents, or do you want it—Boom! —at the top of the screen.

Basically, it means real-time access to another system. There's no lag. It's real-time access to a piece of information that resides in another system. Yes, you could crawl your CRM system, or your Exchange system with our product and with our competitor's products and have your search term show up in a list of documents. But that's very different from the five-day weather forecast showing up at the top of the search results.

Can companies set it up to feed them whatever results they want?
Yes, because it's a development environment. Any given company may have all sorts of information that they would like to make available, and they can make it all keyword triggered. You could type the word "contact" and then a name and it would go to Exchange. It's really up to the administrators to decide how they want to trigger it.

But the user experience—and this is really important to us—entirely mimics how Google.com works. So, you don't have to get training; you can discover it over time; a friend can show you a OneBox that they think is particularly useful. For example, one of our partners is Oracle, and you'll be able to look up a purchase-order in your Oracle financial system because Google will recognize what a purchase order number looks like. Just like Google.com recognizes a UPS tracking number. The Enterprise system will know what an Oracle purchase order looks like, and it will insert that information right at the top.

Next page: Google's Lofty Goal