Google celebrates 7th birthday with renewed vigour

Search-engine giant Google celebrated its seventh birthday in September 2005 with a further assault on the enterprise-search space.

The company launched the Google Enterprise Professional programme in an effort to persuade more businesses to use the search company’s technology. The new programme provides training for developers, consultants and independent software vendors interested in extending Google’s enterprise-search capabilities and in delivering complementary technology and services to Google’s enterprise customers.

In particular, they will be trained in the Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop Search for Enterprises and in building solutions that enable companies to use Google’s technology to search for information in sources that are not currently accessible, such as SAP enterprise applications or databases residing on mainframe systems.

Google executives claim the company already has some 2,000 enterprise customers – twice as many as this time last year. They include Pfizer, Xerox, Hitachi Data Systems, Nextel Communications, Procter & Gamble, and the US Army.

However, enterprise search competitors such as Verity and Autonomy continue to insist that Google’s popular search technology is not sufficiently sophisticated to tackle the challenge of returning relevant results from the variety of data found in corporate IT systems inside the firewall.

The partner programme is currently open to US partners only but will expand to other geographies next month, say company executives. One of the programme’s earliest members is integration software company iWay, a division of Information Builders. The company has already announced the iWay Enterprise Index, which brings together iWay’s application-integration technology and the Google Search Appliance to create a searchable corporate information system. The iWay Enterprise Index taps into information streams (EDI messages, e-mail, XML documents, flat files and so on), transforms them into more usable and uniform XML-based formats and prepares them for search by end users.

Earlier in the month, Google also announced it had appointed internet pioneer Vinton Cerf as its ‘chief internet evangelist’. Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocols used to develop the internet’s underlying architecture, will now help Google to build network infrastructure, architectures, systems and standards.