OpenPipline is an open source software project for crawling, parsing, analyzing and routing documents. I joined the board of advisors a while back and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally got around some time to put effort into really contributing. The goal is to develop a standard framework for developing enterprise search applications. Enterprise search products have similar architectures yet they are typically incompatible with one and another. Something developed for one…can not be processed by another.
We’ve started out building on a commercial release of the pipeline processor and have begun to integrate it with some of our Google Search Appliance customers. For them, this tool provides the ability to convert document types that are not support by the GSA or other extraction techniques. It really depends on the requirements.
Our first contribution to the project is a commercial release of a stage that publishes the item from OpenPipeline to a Google Search Appliance. By combining the technologies, you get an open text processing framework along with Google’s powerful algorithm.
We believe in the benefits of effective search. At MC+A, search is more than an add-on or after thought. We strongly feel that search should be at the core of your IT efforts to help you work better. It today’s market, even with talk that the worst is behind us, reducing cost of technology investments is important. IT investments need to produce results and justify their cost.
Along these lines we’re proud to announce a new Search Hardware Renewal Program, design specifically to help our current Google Search Appliance users to renew their solution along with the services they need to maximize their return on investment. Effective November 1st we’re offering all renewing Google Search Appliance customer a discount on our renewal hardware packaged with our Search Best Practices service review. We are hoping to help our clients continue their enterprise search initiatives, maintaining a substantial ROI and competitive edge due to less wasted time and resources searching for documents.
What is the Search Hardware Incentive Program?
The program is straight forward. Current customers will have an opportunity to trade in their old end of license GSA for a discount credit toward their renewal.
Simply turn in your old GSA for a brand new yellow box (GB-7007 running version 6.0) and MC+A will provide a 10% discount on renewal hardware with our Search Best Practices package. We’ll even cover the shipping for your old GSA.
What is in it for you?
Keeping up with the latest Google search technology. There have been three major releases in the past 12 months and a new appliance platform the GB-7007.
MC+A implementation experience. Over 75 implementations in the past two years. We’ll help you maximize your ROI and leverage your search technology so that you’re effectively using it shortly after your purchase.
So, how does it work?
Inform your sales rep that you would like to take advantage of SHIP.
MC+A will process your hardware renewal and execute the SBP review.
Once your new hardware is up and running. MC+A will process your hardware trade in. We’ll even cover the shipping for your old GSA.
Truly see what the Google Search Appliance can do for you an your business. Renew today.
Google Business published a video detailing some of the new version of the Appliance(see below). The new version of the Google Search Appliance has improved and new features in the following areas:
If you are an early adopter of Windows 7 and you own a Google Search Appliance, be sure to set the following local policy so that Kerberos will be enabled:
Local Security Policy
Local Policies
Security Options
Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos
Enabling all options under Network Security: Configure encryption types allowed for Kerberos
A couple of days ago, Google announced a proposal to make AJAX crawlable.
From the Web Master Central:
This will benefit webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based websites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the web.
Google’s Stated Proposals Goal:
Minimal changes are required as the website grows
Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content
The Proposal: Making AJAX Crawlable (in short): Full Proposal Slightly modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages
Adding a token to ajax url to make it possible to recognize stateful AJAX pages.
Use a headless browser that outputs an HTML snapshot on your web server
The headless browser would generate HTML code based on the final state on the page.
Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state
Escaping the state and adding it to the query parameters with a token.
Show the original URL to users in the search results
This could be very interesting if Google goes to production with it. We’ll keep an eye on this to see what impact it will have for our client and the community.
Often during our implementations we find that DNS is not set up properly for the DMZ or other vlan. In these cases, it would be great if you could specify a hosts file on the appliance. In version 6.0 of the appliance, you can.
The administration override for DNS can be found here:
Google Search Appliance customers typically find value in the product
In August, we published our first public survey here. Our goal was to explore how many of the basic features of the Google Search Appliance were being implemented by customers of the product. We promised to share the results of the survey when we completed it. After 6 weeks, we’ve decided to wrap up this survey and begin to start planning for the next one next quarter. Here are the results are our observations of the survey.
Summary
At the time of this writing, only 18 responses were received. The number of responses received makes the survey generally statistically insignificant. However, the responses fall in line with our previous expectations. We also feel that most of the responses were from our customers and not of the general population of Google Enterprise customers. This would mean that that would be mostly in the United States and a systems integrator would have more involvement with them then of a typical Google Enterprise customer.
Overall,
Customers think the Google Search Appliance provides value
Customers are typically not investing significantly in their implementation(beyond the cost of the GSA).
Customers are not using OneBoxes.
Most customers could be using their appliances to crawl more content.
We’ll begin to create another survey in October, conduct it in November and publish it in December. If you have input for the survey, please contact us.
If you are a developer of external feeds to the Google Search Appliance, you spend a lot of your time waiting for feed process to move from the “Feeds” page to update. There is an new feature to view the remaining count of documents waiting to be processed. This can be accessed by going to /getbacklogcount on the back of the feed service port 19900. Try it out:
A few weeks ago, I published a request for responses to a simple survey regarding how customers are using their Google Search Appliances. After much arm twisting we’ve managed to get a few people to respond and are going to publish our findings here on this blog at some point on Friday. If you have not done so, please fill the survey out. It will literally will take less than one minute. It’s a simple Google Spreadsheet.
A few weeks back Google announced a “Welcome Package” for new customers who purchase a Google Search Appliance with a 1 Million document license. As a Google Enterprise Partner we are excited to be participating in this promotion.
Return on Information
We believe very strongly in enabling clients to manage their technology solutions, and because of this have always offered and strongly suggested our Jumpstart services to all our clients. What is exciting about this promotion is that new customers will be getting 2 days of consultation on getting your Google solution up and running, for FREE.
The Specifics
From Google:
“With this ROI JumpStart, new GSA users will accelerate their onboarding experience, from purchasing to deploying to getting relevant results to end users. Our partners will work with your team on site for two days, at no cost to you, sharing proven expertise and the GSA’s out-of-the-box results and getting your new GSA indexing repositories across your organization.”
Interested in more information about the ROI Jumpstart Offer? Contact MC+A and we’ll be happy to discuss the Jumpstart in detail.
