Google Search Appliance


Google Search Appliance

A rack-mounted computer from Google that is used to index documents for a company. Using Google's proprietary Google File System (GFS), appliances are available that index millions of documents, with entry-level units indexing up to a half million. The devices support searching across servers, intranets, databases, hosted services and content management systems. It functions like a Web search engine; crawling the content in the enterprise and producing master indexes of all the data.

In 2016, Google announced that after 14 years, the device is being dropped in favor of its cloud-based replacement. See Google File System.