Hidden Features in the Google Search Appliance 6.0 Release – Part 1
September 2nd, 2009
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:
- Based on a url pattern
- 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!
