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!