The new Google Search Appliance—a bridge to the cloud

(Cross-posted from the Enterprise Blog)

In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used by more than 3 million businesses—and services like Twitter. Starting today, Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance lets workers search across both on-premise and cloud-based content from a single search box, delivering more comprehensive results and improving productivity. We’ve also added a few other handy features that make it easier to collaborate and find information faster.

Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance
Cloud Connect displays relevant, personalized results from Google Docs and Google Sites alongside results from more traditional repositories, like file shares and content management systems. Easier access to collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations and sites with Cloud Connect speeds up how quickly coworkers can complete projects. Cloud Connect also lets users search content from Twitter, as well as blogs and industry websites via Google Site Search.

For organizations such as Delta Hotels and Avago that have already deployed both Google Apps and the Google Search Appliance, the Cloud Connect feature brings “universal search” to a new level, with more accessible business systems and content now spanning from cloud to ground.

People Search
This new version also helps foster faster collaboration between employees with the addition of People Search, which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for “field marketing” would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there’s an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly.

Dynamic Navigation and more
Our new Dynamic Navigation feature allows users to drill down into search results based on search modifiers for their queries, and Active-Active Mirroring improves reliability by spreading search traffic across multiple boxes. Dynamic Navigation was a top user request and we’re glad to be able to add it. In addition, the Search Appliance now supports Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 content without the need for additional connectors.

As you move your business to the cloud, the Google Search Appliance’s new features can be an important bridge between on-premise and cloud-based systems, while enhancing employee collaboration. You can learn more about this latest release at www.google.com/gsa.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search

This week in search 10/16/10

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Autocomplete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. is searching for. Here’s this week’s round up of updates:

A birthday surprise
Because doodles are such a fun part of the search experience, we thought we’d share a fun little way Google will help celebrate your birthday. When you include your date of birth on your Google profile, you may notice a special treat on the Google homepage on your birthday (be sure to sign in). Click on the doodle for another birthday surprise!

Renaming Google Suggest
We first launched Google Suggest in 2004 in Labs to help people enter their searches faster. Suggest has been a very popular feature, and some people have been asking what happened to it. Never fear, it hasn’t gone anywhere—we just renamed it to “Google Autocomplete.” As part of our launch of Google Instant, we thought "Autocomplete" fit better with the new functionality—automatic queries and automatic results.

Google Instant in new countries across Asia
We’ve been rapidly expanding Google Instant around the globe. Last week we launched Instant in Australia, India, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Now that it’s been a few weeks since our initial release, we’ve been finding that people are really learning how to get the most out of Instant. For example, in just two weeks, we saw an increase in the fraction of searches performed without hitting enter or clicking search. This is a very demanding launch for our infrastructure and we’re expanding around the globe as soon as we can.

Eurostat data in search
We’ve also rolled out some improvements our public data search features. We’ve been working closely with Eurostat to surface some really useful and interesting data about unemployment rates, government debt, minimum wage and broadband penetration across Europe. Try searching for [arbeitslosenstatistik deutschland], [smic france] or [deuda publica españa] to see examples of this data visualisation in action. The data is available across 34 languages. We’ve also internationalized data from the World Bank. You can learn more on our European policy blog.

The week in searches
Curious to know what Google Searches skyrocketed in the U.S. this week? Check out the Google Beat, where you’ll find an inside look into what people are clicking on Google. This week, we cover everything from Columbus Day to Brett Favre and the buzz around “Cigar Guy.”

We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more next week.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director, Search Product Management

Clean water for those who need it

In August, I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro—the highest mountain in Africa, at 19,340 feet (5895 meters). I practiced by going for a three-day hike along the “Lost Coast” of California. One thing I noticed while hiking is that you're continually thinking about water. How much do you need to carry on your back? Do you have enough water to last until you can refill your supply? How do you take water from a stream and make it safe to drink?

When I left for Tanzania, I ran a campaign to raise money for charity:water, a non-profit that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Many of us take water for granted: you turn on the tap, or buy a bottle at the store, and there it is. But it's not like that for everyone. Many people in the world have to think about water all the time. People often walk miles to get water and miles to carry it back, and worry about whether it’s safe to drink. More than a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. As a result of unsafe water and bad sanitation, people in some developing countries are more likely to contract illnesses that are basically preventable but still kill thousands of people, including many children, every day.

Organizations are stepping up to the plate to focus on this issue. While there is much more work to do, the United Nations is on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal of halving, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. This year’s Blog Action Day theme is water, and with that in mind, we thought we’d share a bit about Google’s efforts to conserve water, in a variety of ways.

One of key area where we can make a contribution is through our data center operations. On average, two gallons of water is consumed for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced in the U.S., because water is needed for power plants to operate. That means that by building what we believe to be the most efficient data centers in the industry, we’re saving fresh water. Every year, our data centers save hundreds of millions of gallons of drinking water simply by consuming 50% less electricity than the industry average for technology companies.

A major reason why our data centers are so energy efficient is that we use evaporation to cool our facilities, rather than a more traditional chiller. Evaporative cooling uses far less power than a chiller—so by using a fraction of a gallon of water for evaporative cooling, we save a gallon of water at the power plant. We’ve also made an effort to minimize the amount of fresh water directly consumed by our facilities by using recycled water. Rather than use clean, potable water, we treat wastewater until it’s clean enough to be used for cooling. Two of our data centers run on 100% recycled water already—one by filtering water taken from an industrial canal, and one by taking “greywater” from a city wastewater treatment plant and cleaning it before using it in our cooling towers. We’re also working on new, geographically appropriate systems, like large rainwater capture ponds at one site and a seawater cooling system at a data center that is currently under construction. We set an aggressive goal a few years ago to use recycled water for 80% of our total data center water consumption by the end of 2010. Although we’re unlikely to meet that stretch goal, we believe we’ve made a lot of progress and are hopeful that by the end of this year recycled water will account for almost half of our total consumption.

We’ve also made some small changes at the Googleplex in Mountain View. Earlier this spring, we worked with the city of Mountain View to become the first commercial customer of recycled water for irrigation. We’re using it now on our sports fields as well as in a few of our buildings here in Mountain View. A few years ago we did water audits of our buildings to determine where we could make changes to save more water. We’ve since refreshed several of our buildings with new, very low-water use fixtures. And we’ve also experimented with phasing out the use of bottled water on campus, replacing plastic bottles with water filters and reusable cups. Not only does bottled water use up more energy in production and transportation, and create waste through plastic bottles (many of which are never recycled)—the Sierra Club estimates (PDF) that it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of bottled water.

This Blog Action Day, I hope you’ll take a moment to reflect on your own water use, and on what you might be able to do to make a difference. You don’t have to climb a mountain to help others gain access to clean water.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

Strike up the band: over 10 million have gone Google with Apps for Education

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog)

It was four years ago this month that Google Apps for Education first touched down, right before a pivotal football game between ASU and USC—fatefully enough, two schools that were among the first to move to Google Apps and pave the way for other schools to adopt this “alien technology.”

This week at EDUCAUSE we’re celebrating with these schools and the thousands of others that make up more than 10 million students, staff, faculty and alumni that are actively using Apps for Education on campus. We figured that nothing was more fitting than a tailgate celebration to toast the colleges and universities that have “gone Google.” And of course, it’s not really a party without inviting the marching band.



In the last four years we’ve seen a lot of changes, both to our tools and the general landscape of cloud computing in higher education. According to the 2010 Campus Computing project, nearly 85% of four-year colleges and universities are already using or considering moving to the cloud by offering hosted email to their students. Of those schools that have already made the move, more than 56% of them have gone Google.

As part of this sustained momentum, we’ve seen the number of active Google Apps for Education users double since last fall, with more than two million new users coming on board since May alone; not to mention the emerging growth we’re now seeing in the K-12 space.

Hundreds of schools have made the move to Google Apps just this year, including Gonzaga University, Barnard, Brown University, William and Mary, Villanova University, Georgetown School of Business, Case Western Reserve University, Hawai’i Pacific University, Brandeis University, more than half of the 23 campuses in the California State University system, Morehouse College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M Alumni, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, 13 of the SUNY schools, Pace University and Wilfrid Laurier—to name just a few.

The USC Trojan Marching Band helped us give a spirited cheer to the schools who have gone Google and the progress we’ve seen in the last four years. But like any good commencement address will tell you, this is only the beginning.



Posted by Miriam Schneider, Apps for Education team

Global economies, global business

Today the world is becoming more global all the time. People of different walks of life feel the effects of globalization in their life. It is important to find out what you get out of IT outsourcing and whether it is economically viable. With this in mind you can get many new ideas and search for better decisions for yourself and your business.

With a nice carputer you can get the best out of everything in life but you have to make sure that the best people work for you and you can control them accordingly. If you spend some time every day finding out what your people are doing you can be sure they are working hard on bringing you more money and making you an even richer person.

You have to control demand response projects with the help of online conferences and chats, as well as high quality project management software solutions. It is vital to make sure that you will be looking at these things accordingly and you will avail of everything that is going on in the world of offshore companies and businesses. With these tips it will be easier to have everything under control.

Physical Or Virtual Web Hosting?

Why there is a necessity for a web hosting? For example, you have created the web site on the local computer. Now before you there is a following question: how to place it the web site on the Internet so that a certain user could look at any moment at the given website?

Virtual web hosting — the ideal decision for a small business

It's obvious that website placing on your local computer demands plural expenses and investments. But there is a simple and inexpensive way which allows to get rid of them — the professional web hosting. Certainly, it's possible to make so that from the Internet any interested persons could look through the given page directly from your computer.

But it means that: first, your computer should work constantly; secondly, should be constantly connected to the Internet; thirdly, connection with the Internet should be carried out with a great speed, after all if some persons at once will want to look at your web page, speeds of usual telephone connection will be insufficiently. Besides, you should install the additional software on your computer.



If your website is small (for example, 50~100Mb) the most effective and popular decision is the so-called virtual server when one server of the provider the Internet (hosting-provider) provides functioning of several virtual web sites. This service is called a hosting of virtual servers for websites or simply — blog web hosting. The virtual hosting provides access to your web site for any user the Internet at any time and from any point of the World.



If your small website reincarnates in due course to the large web portal, and you want, that all technical resources of a Web server were used on-maximum then the physical hosting is necessary for you. The physical hosting it's place of your computer in territory of the telecommunication center of hosting provider.



The basic differences of a physical hosting from a virtual hosting consist in the following: absence of restrictions on the used software and technology (these restrictions necessarily are present at use of a virtual hosting); use of technical resources of the server only for your project (at a virtual hosting resources are in the general using of all virtual servers), thus, the website builder possesses full freedom for maneuvers; at placing of several your Internet projects on your computer it will be more convenient and even more favorably, than a virtual hosting.

The Funny Web Hosting Tutorials

On the approach a new era of battery chargers

Association Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) has co-ordinated the standard of wireless charging devices under name Qi, is informed in the official press release.

United Wireless Standart

Creation of the uniform standard will allow to increase greatly number of wireless devices from 100 thousand to 100 million. Thus, by 2014 the market of wireless charging will grow on 700%.

About intention to make corresponding devices already have declared companies Energizer and Sanyo. So, Energizer has presented device Inductive Charger. Device will go on sale in the autumn of 2010, with its help it will be possible to charge smart phones: iPhone and BlackBerry.

In turn Sanyo, is announced release of accumulators for a wireless battery charger.

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