Training is fun!

Posted by Salim Parak, Google Enterprise Training Team

While it is simple and easy to configure your Google Search Appliance or Google Mini to crawl content and serve search results, our engineers are hard at work adding more and more functionality. Why not learn about how to take advantage of these features?

Everyone has a different learning style, whether it be self-exploration or in the classroom. You can select the content delivery option that fits your need best:

Browse our library of self-paced training videos (current customers only)
Explore the online tutorials
Take an instructor led class from our certified training partner

Also note, Google partner Fig Leaf Software will be delivering courses in San Francisco this September. For our Mini customers, they are offering an introductory special on their new Google Mini 1 day course.

Stay tuned, we are working on offering more instructor led content in locations closer to you.

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Providing the Ultimate Search Experience - Part I

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

So, for those of you that have unwrapped your blue or yellow box with excitement and are wearing the Google T-shirt proudly, the fun is just beginning... As promised in my 'How to take your Enterprise Search to the next level' blog post from a few weeks ago, I plan to continue this series of posts by introducing best practices that will provide your searchers with the ultimate search experience.

First, the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance make it very easy to stay current on our software. As part of your support agreement, you can download all software updates and releases right from our support site.

Unlike more bulky enterprise search solutions, staying current on Google software is a built-in feature of the version manager within the appliance so there's no reason not to do it!

Here are the top 10 reasons to make sure you are running the latest release (4.6.4 G70) today!

1. Integration with Google Analytics
2. Google Sitemaps export
3. Enhanced security - support for NTLMv2
4. Query expansion in multiple languages
5. New crawl reporting
6. New reboot and shutdown buttons
7. Source Biasing - you can let the appliance know which URL patterns are more authoritative (GSA only)
   
8. Preview of Dynamic Result Clustering (GSA only)
   
9. Google products are always fast - but we've made this release even faster!
10. So you can follow along with these blogs and get the most out of your search appliance!
    

The newest releases can always be found at http://support.google.com/enterprise and you can always find more information on the new features in our release notes located at: https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/relnotes/relnotes_464G70_O.html#NewFeatures.

Upgrading couldn't be easier:

1. Download the system update file from the support site
2. Log in to Version Manager and Install the file you just downloaded by following the easy wizard prompts
   
3. Repeat the above steps for the software update file
4. Generate and test a new index
5. Once everything is working fine, accept the new update

The best thing about upgrading is, before you decide to switch over, you can have both versions of the software running in parallel! Your users will continue to see the older version, but you and your team can test out the newer version. Once you're satisfied that everything is working great, you can make the switch over. Google has provided a built-in QA environment right on your appliance!

To see detailed step-by-step instructions, Mini customers can visit https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/mini/00/update_index_page.html and GSA customers can visit https://support.google.com/enterprise/doc/gsa/00/update_index_page.html .

Stay tuned for examples of how you can leverage some of these great new features!

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Expanded capacity for Custom Search Business Edition

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

It's been more than a month since we launched Custom Search Business Edition, and already thousands of websites have adopted it for site search. When we launched, businesses could use our online checkout process to buy site search up to 50,000 web pages. A number of businesses asked us about searching more than 50,000 pages, so today we added two more options to the online Custom Search Business Edition offering. We've introduced two new plans that businesses can purchase online:

• Search up to 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
  
• Search up to 300,000 web pages: $2,250 per year

If you want to search more than 300,000 pages, contact us.

Businesses can sign up for Custom Search Business Edition in just a few minutes. If you want to learn more about Google's site search solutions, we'd also recommend you attend a webinar.

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Simply Sophisticated - the Google Mini

Posted by Dave Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise


With Google Apps and Google Custom Search Business Edition we've been touting the benefits of hosted services. However, this doesn't mean we're trying to move everything to the cloud. Instead, we continue to focus on offering the right software architecture for a specific job - desktop software, appliance, client-server or hosted.

For example, we chose an appliance architecture for our Google Mini in order to simplify installation and upkeep, provide more complete control over how frequently content is indexed and to securely search both public and private content - simple yet sophisticated.

We recently added many new features to the Google Mini, and it continues to garner great accolades. In a recent ZDNet product review, Jonathan Bennett comments that of search products available today, the Google Mini is "...probably the simplest to get working, yet highly capable and configurable." Add that to the 4 star rating that the Mini received in a June PC Magazine review and you have a happy product manager and even happier customers.

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