Ziff Davis Media Makes "Marked Leap" with Google Search Appliance

When it comes to evaluating technology products, who would know better than Ziff Davis -- with two dozen web sites, and between 11 and 12 millions unique visitors a month to popular destinations such as pcmagazine.com and eweek.com?

That's why we're especially proud that when it came time for Ziff Davis to select a search product for themselves, they selected the Google Search Appliance.

"The goal of search is the same as the goal of our websites: connecting people to the information they need as quickly as possible," says Jason Young, president of consumer and small business for Ziff Davis Media. "We have made a marked leap forward with the Google Search Appliance by bringing more relevant content to the forefront."

It is a marked leap both in relevancy and in advanced search capabilities. Working with LTech Consulting, a Google Enterprise Professional partner, consumers can now refine searches and drill down within dynamically generated categories -- such as the specific price of a camera on pcmag.com.

While search results are better, so was the process of achieving them. "Once you have the Google Search Appliance installed, it requires little – if any – human intervention," says Nino Tasca, director of Internet Technology for Ziff Davis. "That has saved us countless hours in comparison to our previous search product."

Thanks Ziff Davis, for yet another valuable review.

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Don't Hassle the Hoff

From his talking Trans Am on the television show Knight Rider to his suped-up patrol boat on Baywatch, David Hasselhoff clearly has an eye for performance machines in sleek packages. That's why, when he stopped by Google's London office this week, he was excited to take the Google Search Appliance out for a spin with our UK sales manager, Robert Whiteside. Add an oscillating red light to the front of the appliance, and we think it's ready for a cameo in David's latest video.

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Enterprise Unplugged

If you thought walking and chewing gum at the same time was hard, try walking and searching your corporate information! But wait...now that the new Google Search Appliance Mobile edition has hit the streets, you can do just that. Access your enterprise info while on the go, including searching your corporate network, databases, various content management systems, and your public website. You can even leverage our Google OneBox for Enterprise technology to get real-time info from a range of other business applications!

To make this even more useful, we’ve partnered with Motorola to integrate enterprise search powered by the Google Search Appliance with the next generation of the MOTOPRO Mobility Suite.

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And the Survey says...

A recent reader poll at ITWire found that 88 percent of respondents consider Google a serious threat to Microsoft's corporate search business.

We like to think of it more as an alternative, than a threat. But we're still glad so many people agree.

The article also said, "analysts believe the experience that users are getting typing natural language queries into the Google search box on the web will translate to natural language searching for corporate records, rather than users drilling down through applications and directories to find records."

That's something users have been telling us for years. We're glad the analysts now agree.

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How I Learned to Stop Guessing and Use Analytics

As a product management intern with the Enterprise team this summer, I've seen a number of Mini customers use its reporting features to optimize their site and search - with great results - and it seems like a no-brainer to me to enable our customers to go a step further, using Google Analytics. Analytics is a sophisticated and free web analytics product that provides both key integrations with Google Adwords and comprehensive reporting on visitor behavior, content performance and e-commerce. Google Analytics is an easy-to-use, web-based system designed to reveal how users interact with your site and to help you improve your web presence. More often than not, we're finding that the customers who are concerned about search performance and who are purchasing Minis are the same customers who are turning around and using real usage data to optimize their websites.

So after only about a month here, I'm really excited to announce the completion of my first project - the distribution of free Google Analytics accounts to all current Google Search Appliance and Google Mini owners!

Google Analytics will help Enterprise customers answer questions like:

"What is my most popular content, the new product pages for our big release or the company party pictures?"

"Which Adwords are the most profitable, and which campaigns are best?"

"How popular is our user registration process, and how often do those who sign up then purchase a product? Or are users just after the free content?"

"We've heard internationalization is a good thing – but where are our visitors coming from and what technologies are they using to access our site? Wouldn't it be neat if we could visualize all of these visitors on a world map?"

If you're a customer, you can locate your very own account code by signing into your http://support.google.com/enterprise account and clicking on the Profile link on the left-side bar. Once you retrieve your account code, go to https://www.google.com/analytics/home/ and click on the "Sign Up Now" link. Upon filling in your account details and pressing the "Create my account," button, you'll be given the ability to enter your Analytics account code. Also on http://support.google.com/enterprise, you'll find a brief document which summarizes the advantages of Google Analytics and how to pair it with the Mini.

With the combination of the Google Mini or Search Appliance and Google Analytics, I expect we'll see a ton more success stories like the great ones in these customer videos.

Keep checking back!

-Matt Kulick

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How can IT be seen as innovators?

Its just not fair. Information Technology (IT) departments seem to always get the short end of the stick when it comes to being "liked" inside the company. In the absolute best case, when everything is going perfectly, they go unnoticed. In the more normal case, they are the "bad guys" who either can't give users what they want, or worse yet -- ban products and services that users bring into the workplace.

In his recent article, In Depth: Is Centralized IT Killing Tech Innovation?, Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek takes on this interesting topic looking at the problem from both sides. Our own Dave Girouard is also quoted from his recent talk at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

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Crystal clear value

BusinessObjects' Crystal Reports business reporting tool and their BusinessObjects XI platform allows many organizations to access, analyze, and more intelligently use the information in their ERP systems and data warehouses.

BusinessObjects' desire to make information useful and their focus on the user made them a natural fit for a partnership with us. As a first step in that partnership, they've opened up their vault of information to Google Search Appliance users by creating an integration kit to allow inclusion of their content in Google search results.

They've created both a OneBox module and a content feeder for the Google Search Appliance that will allow Crystal Reports, Intelligence documents, and Dashboards from your BusinessObjects BI platform to be incorporated seemlessly into search results.

For good measure, they've also written a Google Desktop plug-in so you can find that Crystal Report you've saved but forgot to publish.

Obviously we're excited about this growing partnership and the value it'll bring to our users.

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Rob, we’re glad you had fun

Nothing makes us prouder than hearing about the experiences customers have with our products.

We just happened to notice a blog post by Rob, a webmaster in Steenwijk, Netherlands. In his post, Rob does a thorough review of his experience implementing a Google Mini for his website – everything from unpacking it, setting it up, to crawling and tweaking the results page UI. So if you’re curious about the Google Mini, we encourage you to read about Rob’s experience. My favorite line in the blog is the one that says: “The Google Mini really lives up to its expectations. It was great fun to do.”. Thanks Rob - that’s great to hear!

Rodrigo

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Doing it iWay: Google OneBox for Enterprise

Ever since we launched Google OneBox for Enterprise as a new feature of the Google Search Appliance, interested users have been asking us for ways to access even more dynamic enterprise content. Now, Information Builders, one of our longest-standing enterprise partners, has answered the call by putting together a pair of OneBox modules to add to our growing collection.

IBI's WebFOCUS module interacts with their business intelligence system, allowing users to access WebFOCUS business intelligence reports, database records and real-time messages directly from their Google Search Appliance UI.

IBI's second module taps into their iWay Universal Adapter Suite. With a little customized setup for specific applications, iWay's module will allow users to access content from any application, database, content management system, custom application system or legacy transaction system that iWay's adapter suite can access. All from the Google Search Appliance.

To access these modules plus any others in our module gallery, check out:
http://code.google.com/enterprise

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