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This year's product of the year winner in the Enterprise Search category is Google Enterprise, a repeat winner in the category.

In addition to Google, the nominees for Enterprise Search included: ISYS, X1, Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007, Coveo, and Fast.

Fast Search made a strong showing in this year's voting. With the process of Microsoft acquiring Fast Search underway, only time will tell to see how fast this impacts the enterprise search market and how it complements/changes the search offerings of Microsoft Sharepoint.

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Still, Google owns the Internet search arena with more than 58 percent of all searches going its way, according to December 2007 Nielsen NetRatings, and it looks like the company is poised to move toward domination of the enterprise as well, having won this category for the second year in a row.

As you would expect, Google Enterprise offers cutting-edge web site search solutions that utilize a version of their "special sauce" algorithm customized for the needs behind the firewall. It comes as no surprise (wouldn't want anyone tinkering with the "special sauce," right?) that the Google products are hosted solutions with the onus being on the Google infrastructure to support your business needs. The pricing (which starts at $100 per year to search up to 5,000 documents) and extendibility make this solution accessible for just about any size business (30 million max document capacity).

Google Search Appliance is where the real enterprise value comes in. You can search not only web content (Intranet and Internet) but also databases, content management systems, and legacy systems from one place. Anyone who has ever tried to find information within the company walls knows that a search is not worth much if it cannot access all the disparate data stores all at once while still maintaining proper access and security.

One Intranet Journal voter summed this up by saying in reference to Google: "one machine can index all my file servers with permissioning."

Pricing for the Google Search Appliance is targeted toward serious business users and starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents with a 30 million maximum document capacity.

As with all Google offerings both public and private, the user interface is clean and easy for all levels of technical expertise (or lack thereof) to use. Our voter comments echoed this with snippets like "Ease of use" and "The best!" Given the vast range of skill levels within a company, this is crucial to temper the nonstop learning curve that exists with new technologies.

To learn more about Google Enterprise visit the company's web site.

Using her signature down-to-earth-plain-English approach to web technologies, Paula Gregorowicz works with small businesses so they are completely, authentically represented and "comfortable in their own skin" on the web. (www.paulagwebdesign.com)

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