MC+A

Google announced on Tuesday the end of life schedule for software versions 5.2, 6.0 and 6.2.  The 5.2 software version is scheduled to be deprecated on April 30, 2011.  Once deprecated, a software version is no longer supported by Google. This means we may require you to update to a supported version, should you require technical support.

The schedule for 6.0 and 6.2 end of life is as follows:

6.0: August 30, 2011
6.2: March 31, 2012

The latest release of the GSA software is 6.8.

LDAP Server Authentication

Prior to version 6.0, you could perform security trimming via LDAP authentication.  But you always had to maintain a custom list of user accounts.  Now with the release of 6.0.  You can use LDAP groups to list Administrators and Managers.

When enabled, you have to additional boxes to list a LDAP group for both the manager and administrator roles (see below).

Basic information regarding the set up can be found here.

With much publicity, Google release software version 6.0 of the Google Search Appliance(GSA).  They main marketing was focused on GSA^n.  That is that a cluster of GSAs can be combined to index a billion documents.  That is far from many of our customers needs.  This series of blog posts detail some of the hidden gems that can be taken advantage of by the more common implementation.

Hidden Feature 1 – Ranking Framework

In the past couple of years, we often get requests for the GSA to be improved based on the popularity of certain sites or pages.  With the Ranking Framework, you can do just that.  The Ranking Framework you can specify boosting:

1. Based on a url pattern
2. Based on a specific url

These can been written to a file and via an ATOM post, the GSA will fetch this file and added it to a result policy.  The following is an example file Google’s documentation:

http://www.important.com/ 1
http://very.important.com/ 3
http://not.important.com/ -1
http://www.important.com/personal_stuff –3

You’ll then need to go and save the policy file to crawl the rescoring to occur.  The API include adding and deleting as well.  Good Luck!

“Suggest” is a new beta feature on the Google Search Appliance 6.0.  Out of the box, it is designed to work with the default style sheet.  However, many of our clients have chosen to use a scripted page (asp/aspx/php/jsp).  In order to get this functionality working, additional coding is required.  This article describes wiring up the search box via a proxy and asp.

The Service

There is a new service located at /suggest.  When you type the queries are sent to it.  The response comes back as a simple JSON package.  It is not encoded in JSONP so if you develop a separate page and want to use it, you’re faced with  a cross site scripting issue.

The Solution

1. Copy suggest_js.js to the site which you want to utilize the service.
2. Create a proxy in your server (code below)
3. suggest_js.js is obfuscated.  But you just need to replace “/suggest” with the location of your new service (has to be at the same domain
4. Add the .ac-renderer, .ac-row, .ac-highlighted and .ac-active styles to your page
5. reference the new suggest_js.js file is reference in your html
6. call the function sgst(‘q’);
7. Start typing!

Proxy Example:

dim srcFile
srcFile = "http://gsa.mcplusa.com/suggest?"
srcFile = srcFile & "token=" & Request("token") & "&max_matches=10"</div>
'Get the JSON
Response.Buffer = True
Dim objXMLHTTP, xml

'Create an xmlhttp object
Set xml = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
xml.Open "GET", srcFile, False
xml.Send

Response.Write xml.responseText
set xml= Nothing

Update!

Mahesh T published a java servlet here.