Google to make sense of companies' filing systems

Google is planning to introduce new hardware and software to navigate corporate intranets and websites.

The search giant is to unveil a new mid-range search appliance, called the GB-5005, which is a multi-server system that indexes up to three million documents. It also plans to introduce security and performance enhancements to two previously sold appliances, all allowing companies to harness Google's acclaimed technology to scan internal networks and public-facing websites.

With the latest upgrades, Google is aiming to further its presence in the corporate market, which it entered early this year. Widely known for its web search engine, the company has sought to broaden its business to corporate customers by adapting its search algorithms for intranets that hold a wide variety of file formats.

Search technology is increasingly important to corporations because it is seen as the key to unlocking repositories of company history and knowledge. As businesses amass data in the form of email, spreadsheets, PDFs, HTML, text and Word files, the need for navigation technology becomes vital.

But mining diverse documents and databases is no easy task and technology advances in this arena have largely been pioneered by companies such as Autonomy, Convera, Inktomi and Verity.

Stefanie Olsen writes for News.com