Experience Management

Last time, we discussed the basics about document filter. In this installment, we will talk about practical aspects of document filter. How to configure document filters? Google had a document explaining the usage of document filters. There are two ways you can configure document filters. The first is at Connector Manager level, specifically within <Tomcat>/webapps/connector-manager/WEB-INF/documentFilters.xml. […]

Document Filter is a mechanism from Google connector framework 3.x to manipulate document during traversal for connectors. It is mainly supported at Connector Manager (CM) level. Thanks to the open source nature of Google connector framework, we could examine carefully about how document filter is defined and implemented. com.google.enterprise.connector.spi.Document Document is an interface defined by […]

If you have read Google’s product literature, you know that the Google Search Appliance is a very secure device.  The bright yellow appliance runs a hardened version of CentOS, and the inner-workings are safely hidden behind root login. So, assuming we are dealing with an appliance with Fort Knox-level protection, what risks remain?  Below are several potential […]

With the new release of Google Search Appliance 7.2, many organizations have plans to upgrade their systems in order to take advantage of the new features. Here is a list of steps with brief description that could help you for a smooth ride during the upgrade. Stage installer files For production upgrade, you would like […]

Optimizing performance of rich media pages is important for performance and can significantly affect perceived performance particularly over narrow links such as mobile.  Unfortunately the manual tuning can be quite time consuming and can even lead to having the code be less maintainable as files get jammed together to avoid round trip latencies.  Fortunately Google […]

Last week Forrester published their first Wave on Digital Experience Platforms.   I was at the IBM Digital Experience Conference and it sounded like IBM was expecting good news from Forrester in this wave.   In fact, Stephen Powers from Forrester was the Keynote speaker at the conference and one of the principal authors of the […]

“Are my GSA search results good?”  Well, if you don’t know, then I don’t know.  This is obviously a subjective question, and you likely know your own content much better than I do.  While I may not be able to answer the question for you, I would like to offer some tips to help objectively measure […]

Today, we welcome Alok Gupta, technical architect, to an elite membership in Perficient’s Google practice. He is the 5th person to receive the GSA certified deployment specialist designation. The 4-part certification process is rigorous and designed to validate the experience of individuals among search partners. The qualification process includes certification in core GSA fundamentals and […]

Google Search Appliance (GSA) frontend framework provides management of most of the elements for user search experience. Many times we need to customize the frontend to achieve a certain feel and HTML display for search results. Normally the changes can be done to the frontend directly via Admin Console and the GSA frontend framework can […]

You may have read recent media coverage about the SSL/TLS MITM vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224).  OpenSSL.org describes this vulnerability as follows: An attacker using a carefully crafted handshake can force the use of weak keying material in OpenSSL SSL/TLS clients and servers. This can be exploited by a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack where the attacker can decrypt and modify traffic […]

Google often quotes that the average query submitted to their website is 1.7 words long.  That means that most queries contain only two words, and a fair number contain only one word.  Google can be magical at times, but using one or two words to search through trillions of web pages seems at best hit or miss.  In […]

UPDATE 2014-07-02: Adaptors are not really evil.  We are currently developing both Connectors and Adaptors.  The point of these articles is to help you draw your own conclusions.  : ) Previously I discussed the Plexi Adaptor framework for the Google Search Appliance. Adaptors can provide a simple and elegant way to index a content repository.  An Adaptor sits in front of a […]