Posts Tagged ‘Google’

I would like to congratulate Anu Pidaparti, Lead Technical Consultant, for achieving her Google Search Appliance (GSA) Qualified Deployment Specialist certification.  Anu is the 6th GSA Qualified Deployment Specialist on our Google team. The 4-part certification process is rigorous and designed to validate the experience of individuals among search partners. The qualification process includes certification […]

This is more of a follow up to my post yesterday on Digital Marketing costing a lot and being worth it. CMO.com has an article on marketers finally getting Google to the point where click through rates are up 19% year over year. “Marketers are optimized almost fully on Google,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst […]

During its big event on 01/21 Microsoft talked a lot about upcoming Windows 10, which should unify Windows on phones, tables, laptops and hybrid devices. There were in-depth presentations about Windows on phones and Windows on desktop. But there is one flavor of Windows which was suspiciously absent from the event – Windows RT. When Microsoft […]

I recently helped one of our clients configure their website to get sitelinks search box working. The following is a brief recap of my work. [Although metlife.com is used as an example in this post, I have had no working relationship with metlife.com] In early September, Google announced an improvement to sitelinks search box, which […]

Yesterday a client asked me what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they should be tracking on their public site search. At first I was afraid I would not be able to answer this question – I don’t know their business or website nearly as well as they do. I know the wide variety of statistics that are […]

I’ve blogged about the personalization failure before.  Now it looks like others are catching on to the ultimate failure on their part, even as they harvest huge amounts of private information about us. This article in ComputerWorld outlines the issues. The author Mike Elgan hits the topic of privacy quickly and never lets it go: […]

In last installment, we carefully examined the usage of document filters in creating feed XML. Feed protocol is a push mechanism for the content source to send information to GSA. Since GSA connector framework 3.0, GSA introduced a Lister/Retriever model, which was first implemented in File System Connector. The connector is no longer using the […]

In this installment, we will discuss how the document filter is utilized by Connector Manager to achieve its functionality. Sometimes it’s very easy to show what’s happening with the code itself. I duplicated many section from Google site, and also provide link to the original source. Since Google engineers keep updating their implementation, the observation […]

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 […]