Google Rescues SharePoint--Search, That Is

Google just released version 6.8 of its Google Search Appliance, an on-premises search solution for Intranet use or an Internet-facing Web site. You can watch a quick little video on YouTube about it. 

Literally it's a yellow box that allows your users to search across corporate portals, websites, file servers, and Content Management systems, and many business applications.  The Butler Group analyzed Google's 6.0 version last year and has an interesting write-up about that version. 

What Google has added to Search Appliance 6.8 is the following:  

    * Cloud Connect - integrated search with Google Apps, Site Search and Twitter

    * People Search - Search profile information about people in your organization

    * Dynamic Navigation - filter search results with specific metadata attributes

    * Active-Active - provide high availability by directing search traffic to multiple appliances

    * Sharepoint 2010 - Search all content within Sharepoint 2010 out of the box.

My first reaction is, why? Why would you bother with this if you've already got SharePoint 2010 and FAST search? I guess the answer is, you don't have "just" SharePoint 2010--you have other business apps, other sites, other Content Management Systems, and the promise/premise seems to be that you can search EVERYTHING.

For more information about SharePoint search, take a look at these pieces:

Microsoft's Jeff Fried tells you the basics about FAST Search in SharePoint in "Introducing FAST Search for SharePoint 2010." 

Also take a look at Fried's "A Search-Driven Application Example."