Long before retail outlets were flooded with Android-powered electronics, Google embarked on its maiden voyage into the world of hardware. Venturing out into uncharted waters, the then only web search company released a glaring yellow box known as the Google Search Appliance. Sticking to its search engine roots, Google's first piece of enterprise hardware was designed to help its customers perform fast and effective searches of internal networks. While the GSA may not be the search juggernaut's most noteworthy piece of equipment, it doesn't mean that the company has abandoned its original vision for the platform.

On Tuesday Google announced its GSA 7 series, which introduces a new user interface, enhanced search tools and the ability to manage larger databases. According to the company, a single rack of its new search appliance can now maintain the equivalent of its web search index in 2000, which is around 1 billion webpages. Not just settling for companies using its office software suite, Google will be targeting large scale organizations with its new GSA. By remembering what brought it to the dance, the search giant appears to be setting the stage to transition from consumer to corporate search kingpin in the coming years. The only foreseeable threat to this enterprise search engine would be Microsoft releasing a corporate Bing Box, but something tells us not to hold our breath waiting for that to happen.

Filed under: Networking, Software, Google

Google goes back to basics, announces GSA 7.0 for all of your enterprise searching needs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.