Google Boxing

So Google has, as expected, announced a number of new features for the Google Search Appliance, the enterprise level search engine in a box that is actually a rebadged Dell PowerEdge with Google inside along with the dual-core Intel Xenons. So what is new, and is it exciting? Well, the new stuff consists of the following, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide just how exciting each feature is:

Results Hit Clustering –
This enables users to drill down on any given subject, effectively and dynamically creating results based subcategories for better search refinement. The ability to customise both location and appearance will, I am sure, be welcomed by most admins as will the time this functionality should shave off of separating the relevant results from the piffle.

Source Biasing –
This menu driven tool makes it relatively easy to assign relevance to search results based upon the authority of the content source, as it impacts upon your business. The fact that this does away with the scripting requirement often found for such functionality in some old school enterprise strength search solutions is laudable.