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Posts Tagged ‘google search appliance’

Document filter inside out (part 1): the fundamentals

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 […]

Is your Google Search Appliance platform secure?

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 […]

Prepare a smooth ride for GSA upgrade with mirroring

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 […]

Google Search With Salesforce

Brendan Callum, a director and whiz extraordinaire in our Salesforce practice, has a video out about what they did with Google Search and Salesforce. The video doesn’t go into a lot of detail but I find it extremely interesting that an appliance (older trend) searches the cloud (ongoing trend) in a secure fashion.  Of course, […]

Are my GSA search results good?

“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 […]

Fifth Google Search Appliance (GSA) Qualified Deployment Specialist Certified

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 […]

Localization of frontend customization

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 […]

Protect your GSA against an OpenSSL Vulnerability

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 […]

Reverse engineering the GSA Query Suggestions feature

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 […]

Plexi (Part 2) – Adaptors are evil!

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 […]

The plumbing of expert search with Google Search Appliance

Expert Search is an important feature from Google Search Appliance (GSA). The default frontend provided out of the box support to Expert Search since 7.0. Here are a few major bullet points that involve Expert search configuration and result display. Configuration of Expert Search for frontend via Admin console (For 7.0, Social Connector → Expert […]

Where’s the beef of your Expert Search, GSA?

When customizing the XSLT stylesheet for Expert Search, I noticed many places where elements starting with /GSP/ExpertSearchConfig/ were referred. However, I have never found any Google document to explain them. From the usage of those elements in the XSLT stylesheet, they looked like the display layout configuration for Expert Search results. Given the fact that […]

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