The Industry Standard is reporting that Google is working to improve the overall reach of their search technology for the enterprise. Now keep in mind that this is an actual hardware appliance, not some software solution. So this makes for a very movable solution for those in enterprise that have the need for such an appliance.

Google Inc. has improved its enterprise Search Appliance so that it can now index documents that aren’t accessible via the Web protocol HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), thus significantly expanding the range of data the product can search for and retrieve. Google plans to announce the improvement Thursday. Google will also begin shipping Thursday a simpler and less expensive version of the Search Appliance, called Google Mini, that is designed for use by small and medium-size businesseses, whose enterprise search needs Google believes are grossly underserved.

The new version of the Search Appliance is able to access for the first time documents that aren’t available via an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Web interface, through two improvements: JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) support, for access to relational databases; and a “feeder” API for establishing links between the Search Appliance and the data repositories of wares such as enterprise business applications, content management software and legacy systems.

�We have added a connection to (relational) databases because naturally in a big company a lot of the information that�s important resides in (relational) databases,” said Dave Girouard [cq], Google’s enterprise general manager. “With the feeder API, instead of relying on the crawler, other content systems within a company can feed information automatically into the Search Appliance.”