MC+A

Google Anaytics is a great solution. Having said that, if you have ever spent time trying to use Site Overlay to really get your head around user interaction in regards to site metrics, you know how frustrating that process can be. Staring at report data while having the live site open in another tab, really left something to be desired.

On Friday, a new feature call In Page Analytics was rolled out by Google. This new feature should go a long way to enhancing the process of understanding user behavior on your site.

This feature should be live in you accounts already and does not require any modification to you ga.js snippet.

In Page Analytics focuses data displays:

• The first is Bubbles. Bubbles indicate which links users clicked on, including a numerical representation of the percentage of total click the link received.
• The second is a little more straight forward, Content Detail. This section additional insight into specific metrics. As with other reports, you can apply advanced segments.

In Page Analytics Overview Video (Google):

On September 23rd, join Smartlogic’s Toby Conrad and MC+A’s founder and managing partner Michael Cizmar for a detailed debrief on how combining Smartlogic’s Semaphore with a Google Search Appliance turns a good search engine into the platform for compelling, intuitive search applications.

Register to Attend this Free Webinar.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

12:00PM PST | 3:00PM EST

The Google Search / Semaphone webinar will cover:

• GSA search foundations (including the 6.4 updates!)
• The semantic extension for ontology and classification that is Smartlogic’s “Semaphore”
• Understanding the GSA integration
• Using metadata to drive faceted search and intuitive, dynamic content navigation
• Providing intelligent links and recommendations between topics
• Using topic pages to drive more traffic to your site and to keep people for longer

About the Presenters

About Michael

Michael Cizmar is the founder and President of MC+A, one of the very first Google Enterprise Professional partners and has advised organizations such as Volkswagen, New York Post, Los Angeles Metro, and Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco on findablity in the enterprise. Michael also serves on the Advisory Board to Open Pipeline.

About Toby

Toby Conrad has been a Senior Consultant with Smartlogic for seven years and has advised organizations such as NASA, Bank of America, RBS, and Schlumberger.

For more information about this and any upcoming events, please contact us.

New Version of Google Search Appliance software 6.4

Google released a patch for appliance software release 6.4.  Release notes can be found here (goes to Google support page).

MC+A support will be contacting MC+A support customers about scheduling a time for the update.

Google.com has begun rolling out Google Instant.  This new feature not only performs a Autocomplete/Search as your type but actually performs a search based on what you have begun typing.  In preliminary testing, users can save 2-5 second per search.

The feature is described in detail at http://www.google.com/instant/  It’s a significant overhaul from the current search infrastructure requiring additional capacity from Google infrastructure to support the additional queries.

Key features:

• Dynamic Results – In addition to autocomplete/search as you type searches are performed and returned while you type.
• Predictions – the autocomplete attempts to predict and display your full query.
• Scroll to Search – You can scroll through predictions instantly with an arrow down.

Zeta byte

In case you didn’t know what a zeta byte is: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gigabytes_are_in_a_zeta_byte

Availability

Google instant is available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8 (we are not sure about Opera) in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK. 

The Problem

Header requests is the default method for how the Google Search Appliance (GSA) performs authorization on a document level (also known as late binding) for web based content (See The Header Requester).  There are numerous advantages and disadvantages.  One of the minuses, is that it relies on the content source to adhere to HTTP protocols.

We’ve experienced numerous content systems that don’t fully support the correct HTTP response for this to work.  In many cases of Lotus Domino or Microsoft SharePoint, a friendly message is return or their is an embedded header.  This causes the to misinterpret the response from the server and think the user has access to the document.

The common method pre 6.4 was to implement a SAML interface and develop custom code to handle the logic for the variety of content sources.  Google released several Open Source projects to jump start your efforts.  Most notably they are:

• Google Value Security Framework
• Google SAML Bridge for Windows

The Solution: Header Request Deny Rules

Those tended to be difficult for our clients to implement and another piece of infrastructure to deploy and manage.  In version 6.4, Google has added additional rule validation on the appliance.  You now can check the most common sets on the appliance with simple configuration:

Screen shot of the Header Request Deny Rule Form

This virtually eliminates many of the customizations that we’ve made for the wrong response.  How Neat!!!

New Version Released For 6.4

Google released a patch for the latest search appliance release.

Release notes can be found here.

MC+A support customers will be contacted to schedule the update.

MC+A will be attending the 2010 Chicago Small Business Expo. Come and stop by our booth (K7) to see how MC+A can help your small business stay connected to your information.

We will be on site discussing Google Apps and its benefits to your business.

For more information, including links to directions and registration check out our event page.

Google has released a patch update to the 6.2 software version. The following list contains a list of the fixes. Compare this list to any issues you having outstanding.

2399366

Sometimes documents with the same date are not sorted by relevance when sorting by date.

2386544

Sometimes sort by date does not sort documents that are chronologically close in the correct order.

2371696

Documents with dates that are in the future are not sorted properly when sorting by ascending dates.

1894928

Error on GSA when configuring Google Apps: “Cannot enable Google Apps Integration.”

2311340

GSA Admin API fails to authenticate requests if timezone is not set to US/Pacific.

1837591

Some Word documents can not be converted resulting in a crawling error.

2300088

GSA cannot convert some documents that contain embedded docs.

2327144

Some internal indexing processes are not properly terminated.

2435021

Stalled connections are not properly detected in replication setup.

2551148

System logs are not properly rotated which can fill disks.

1971858

Search Latency graph is broken under ‘Status and Reports>Serving Status’.

1408031

Encoded non-ascii filenames become garbled if saved with Internet Explorer.

2287126

SupportCall via proxy server fails with Error establishing TCP connection to supportcall.google.com:443: (111, ‘Connection refused’).

2534465

Permanent Redirect URLs with extensions that require Conversion(.doc, .pdf, .xls, etc) are not followed if at redirect time the content-length response is different than 0.

2517840

The Crawl Queue URLs in 6.2 are shown as encoded.

2633250

In federation the primary node tries to authorize urls that have already been authorized by secondary nodes.

2335370

Results with same snippet and title do not get filtered in the search results when using the ‘filter=p’ search parameter.

2487684

The lang_zh-tw language filter fails to show search results beyond the first page.

2358978

RK parameter is not working properly.

2728200

In 6.2.0.G.44-P6 Admin Console is only available in English.

I have had some issue utilizing the Google Admin Toolkit’s python scripts.  Looks like there is some changes to the login and cookie exchange on the new version of the appliance.  There was an old version of a script called db_sync that is no longer posted on there. 

Here it is again and an example of the syntax.

c:\python26\python db_sync.py –hostname 10.10.10.29 –username backup –password Replacewithyourpassword –source db_product

where:

• 10.10.10.29 is the host name or the ip of the server
• backup is the name of the user that will be logging in.
• Replacewithyourpassword is the password (in this case, backup’s password)
• db_product is a db_connector

You can download the zip file here: db_sync

A couple weeks ago Google unveiled what they are calling a “Go Google Cloud calculator” It can be founded at www.gonegoogle.com. The site will help you make a strong business case for switching to Google Apps. While you there you can create a custom URL to share, a presentation PDF, and even a poster to help foster discussion around the business impact of switching to Google Apps. It is worth checking out.