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Google Offers Free in-House Searches

Posted on: Wednesday, 19 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Tony Glover, The Business, London

Oct. 16--Google has begun offering free search technology to allow employees to carry out internal searches on their computers.

The result of a collaboration between Google and IBM, the internal search technology offers business-quality security features. It enables staff to find files such as Word documents and Lotus Notes in the same way that Google searches the web for key words and phrases.

According to Roberto Solimene, Google's enterprise director for Europe, the service plugs the gap between Google's search engine and its powerful back office search computers deployed by organisations such as Morgan Stanley, the British Library and the United Nations. Morgan Stanley, for example, uses Google computers to search an index of 2.2m documents.

The Google Search Appliance computers designed to search through an organisation's entire data are not free, unlike the new Google Desktop for Enterprise. Google Search Appliance computers start at roughly £20,000 (E29,000, $35,000) and can cost up to £150,000. Installed and maintained by Google, they can search between 500,000 and 15m documents in 28 languages simultaneously.

Google hopes this side of its business will be boosted by US legislation introduced in the wake of big corporate scandals. The Sarbanes-Oxley rules mean organisations with business interests in the US must produce a business email on request. Without powerful in-house search technology, it could be a time-consuming, complex task.

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Copyright (c) 2005, The Business, London

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GOOG, IBM, 6680,

Source: Sunday Business

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