Google hosted site search goes global

Posted by Engin Yilmaz, Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Europe

July 2007 saw the launch in the United States of our hosted site search solution, the Custom Search Business Edition (CSBE), for organisations and businesses of all sizes. Today we are pleased to announce that the CSBE is now available internationally in 40 languages and will be offered in almost 80 countries.

Early interest in the global offering has been positive, for example, we recently worked with the UK Parliament to implement the CSBE on their website so that nine million documents have become easily accessible by the public.

Some of the reasons why the UK Parliament and other organisations and businesses choose Google hosted site search include the:

• Highly relevant and sub-second query response times which are characteristic of Google.com
• Speed of implementation with there being no need to install or maintain additional technology
• Power and reliability of Google’s infrastructure
• Ability to setup and manage results online
• Reporting features which give and insight in to visitor behaviour

Google’s Custom Search is also available as a free, ad supported version and the Business Edition provides incremental benefits such as:

• Full customisation of the search results through an XML API
• Options for e-mail and telephone support available through the Google Enterprise group
• The choice of whether or not sponsored adverts are served against visitors search queries

Custom Search Business Edition can be purchased online and starts at $100 a year for up to 5,000 webpages and extends to $2,250 for 300,000 webpages with larger page volumes supported through Google’s Enterprise sales group.

For more information about hosted site search please visit http://www.google.com/sitesearch

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Google Docs Deep Dive

Posted by Kevin Gough, Acting Product Marketing Director

A few weeks ago a representative from PC Magazine contacted me to let me know that Google Docs had won the magazine's editors choice award. In the online review, the editor mentioned the number of new features added over the last year and called Google Docs "more elegant, efficient, and enjoyable" than other online productivity suites. Since we at Google have a launch early and often mentality, I've gotten comfortable with new features appearing in the Google Apps products that I use on a weekly basis. However, this award caused me to pause and take a look back at all of the new features that have been added to Google Docs since I started using it. There were some features, like presentation capabilities and accessing documents on my mobile phone that I've become instant an convert to. However, looking at the "What's new" page of Google Docs, there were a lot that I'd missed.

One of the most interesting enhancements that I discovered were functions within Google Docs spreadsheets that can automatically pull external data from Google search results, Google News and other sources into spreadsheet cells. Check out the video below to see how these functions can make Google Docs a powerful tool for maintaining up-to-date research on competitors, customers or business opportunities.

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Search Quality Feedback Toolkit launched on Google Enterprise Labs

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Enterprise Product Manager

One of the best ways to improve search quality and user satisfaction is to provide your users with quick and easy ways to give feedback. These automated tools make it easy for your users to provide feedback such as:

• "I really like this new search results user interface!"
• "How can I promote my engineering design doc to the top of the search results?"
• "I like the new glossary definition results, but how can I contribute another database search idea?"

These tools will automatically send the user's query with their feedback to a designated mailing list or administrator and then quickly disappear making it fun and easy for users to send feedback on their search experience. For example:


The toolkit provides samples that you can use out-of-the-box, and, since the source code has been made available, customization is easy.

Owners of a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance can optimize their search quality by visiting Google Enterprise Labs to download this toolkit today!

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The past, present and future of email with Google Apps

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Product Manager

We're always looking to make it even easier for companies to move to Google Apps. And some customers are reluctant to step into the future without bringing along the email from their past.

Not long ago, we launched an email migration tool that lets administrators move email from their existing IMAP mail systems to Google Apps, so users didn't have to leave their old mail behind. Since then, more than a hundred million messages have been migrated. But this solution didn't solve the whole problem. If your existing solution didn't support IMAP, you were out of luck.

Today, we're excited to announce the new Google Apps Email Migration API, which can move email from anywhere – not just IMAP systems – to the Premier, Education or Partner Editions of Google Apps. If you need to migrate email from your users' desktops, migrate email from a server not supported by the IMAP migration tool, or do a push migration because of your security policies, a tool built on this API could be the perfect answer.

A growing network of partners now offer helpful and affordable migration solutions to organizations switching to Google Apps. For example, using the Email Migration API, LimitNone has already built a tool called gMOVE, which can move Microsoft® Outlook® calendars, email and contacts into Google Apps. You can find gMOVE and other migration solutions for your organization in our Solutions Gallery.

If you're interested in building an email migration tool yourself using this API, you can create an administrator or end user tool to migrate email extracted from any data source. The email migration API is based on GData, so it's easy to use, and you can learn all about it on the Google Code website. If you are a developer, and think organizations using Google Apps might be interested in what you've built, we could list your offering in our Solutions gallery. Please let us know by submitting your solution.

This API is just the latest in a stream (read, torrent) of innovations we've rolled out this year for Google Apps email. In case you missed any of those improvements, we'd thought we'd list some of the highlights here:

• IMAP support, so you can use your favorite mail clients like Outlook®, Thunderbird® or your iPhone® with Google Apps
• More email storage, up to a whopping 25 gigabytes per users (room for hundreds of thousands of messages)
• 99.9% uptime guarantee, so you can count on Gmail to be available when you need it
  
• Policy management and message recovery, putting more security and compliance controls into the hands of administrators
• Inbound email routing and email gateway support for pilot configurations, dual delivery and mixed messaging environments
• Email migration tool for moving old mail from an IMAP server to Google Apps

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The velocity of business

Posted by Adam Swidler, Product Marketing Manager, Postini

One of the things I've heard a lot since joining Google is "speed matters," and it's been great to have a hand in the rate at which we innovate.

In that spirit, today we're taking another step toward making corporate email communications more secure, compliant and productive. We've started rolling out a new set of tools to help Postini and Google Apps Premier Edition customers protect and manage their electronic communications.

The new capabilities include:

• content-based policy for inbound and outbound email traffic for more protection of sensitive data, such as credit card and Social Security numbers
• the ability to create advanced policy rules based on content patterns and apply a variety of dispositions including logging, routing to reviewer queue, bcc: to reviewer queue, bounce and encrypt using Postini Encryption Services
• new granular content inspection capabilities for messages and attachments
• email security advancements for faster detection and protection of viruses and spam, including early detection of zero hour threats, additional defenses against botnet attacks and new dispositions for encrypted files

The content policy management capabilities and the new email security advancements are being made available as part of the Postini Email Security service and Google Apps Premier Edition at no additional cost.

As part of this launch, we are also rolling out enhancements to the Postini Message Archiving service. These are available to Postini Message Archiving Customers and Google Apps Premier Edition users for an additional fee.

Of course, since our services are hosted, users get access to these tools quickly and seamlessly. Read more.

Coming just eight weeks after the acquisition, and six weeks from the first integration of Postini and Google Apps, we hope this launch is further evidence that Google is committed to continued investment in Postini solutions, as well as accelerated delivery to our customers. Speed does matter!

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Use Google Analytics with your Google Enterprise site search engine

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

The Google Analytics team recently introduced some great new features. Most relevant for this audience was the introduction of site search reporting, which allows you to link your website's internal search engine to your Analytics account.



Google Search Appliance, Google Mini and Custom Search Business Edition customers can leverage the new capabilities provided by Google Analytics and further improve the site search experience on their website by better understanding visitor behavior. You can see what people are searching for on your site and access a number of reports that detail user conversions and query refinements. Configuring your Analytics account to recognize your search engine is easy -- you need only specify the URL for your search engine and identify the query parameters.

Avinash Kaushik, a web analytics evangelist, wrote up this great post about how to use site search reporting to gain insight into what works on your website. The new Analytics functionality includes a number of reports, each of which gives unique insight into your users and your website. With most Analytics reports, you can only interpret what the user really wants. These site search reports are a gold mine of data. When people search for something on your site they are voting for exactly what they want to see. If you provide it, great. If not, they are on to another website. This is the one place where you can see truly qualitative data about what visitors are looking for and adjust your site content accordingly.

Perhaps most interesting in Avinash's example was the comparison of conversions for users who search and those who don't. Conversion for users who didn't search was 3.6%, but for users who did search, conversion was 21%. Presumably, visitors who search are more qualified and likely to convert, but this statistic certainly speaks to the value of having search on your site. Your site's visitor wants to search, and when he does, he's more likely to convert.

If your site does not have search capabilities, checkout the Google Enterprise search products to learn how they can help you to power search on your website.

When properly used, the new Google Analytics reporting will allow you to calculate an ROI for your search investment. If you're not already using Google Analytics on your website, this is one great reason to give it a try. Oh and by the way, Google Analytics is free.

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OpenSocial for Business

Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

Last night's OpenSocial announcement highlighted the simple idea that the web becomes more valuable for users when they can more easily interact with friends and colleagues.

OpenSocial supports this by providing a common set of APIs between a social application and a website. Developers can reach a broad set of OpenSocial-enabled websites using a single HTML/JavaScript-based API, and websites can tap in to the creative energy of a large pool of third party app developers.

As members of Google's Enterprise team, we have a particular passion for serving business users and use cases, which is why we're extra-excited about the business apps OpenSocial will enable.

In fact, in addition to the support announced last night by folks like LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Oracle, we're proud that several Google Enterprise professional partners participated in last night's announcement with demos to preview how OpenSocial will help businesses:

• Salesforce.com demonstrated its platform support as an OpenSocial-enabled website (video, demo about three quarters in)
  
• Theikos and Appirio created OpenSocial apps that run inside Salesforce.com
• LimitNone's iBuild app can now add OpenSocial-powered features to its Gadget-based apps

iBuild empowers non-technical users to create lightweight apps that run as Google Gadgets in iGoogle. Apps like team to-do lists or shared contact managers in a business context or tracking sports teams in a consumer context come to mind. And now, by adding OpenSocial support, those apps can take advantage of social features like publishing actions to activity streams in any OpenSocial-enabled site.

Appirio's Google Gadget Builder for Salesforce.com, which currently allows you to display dynamic "dashboards" of Salesforce.com data on iGoogle, will take a similar approach by incorporating OpenSocial-powered features.

Both developers and users win because these products will work across a growing number of OpenSocial-enabled sites.

If you're a developer and would like to learn more about OpenSocial applications for business, you can start today by signing up for an Orkut or Salesforce.com OpenSocial sandbox account. The list of OpenSocial websites for business will grow over time, but these two early adopters enable you to start exploring today.

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