ARCHIVED: What is a Google Search Appliance?

A Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a physical device that Google licenses to create a custom index of web pages. UITS has a GSA and works with IU web professionals to use it. It crawls the internet just like any other search engine, but UITS can customize what it crawls, taking advantage of its many features to provide a better search experience.

The GSA administrators specify what URLs to crawl or not to crawl. This creates a custom index for GSA users and manages the document count so that the most important content is indexed.

The GSA administrators also create collections and front ends. A collection is a defined subset of the index, which can be referenced in a custom search box. A search box using a collection will only return search results from the desired URLs in the index. A front end is a customized view of search results: The result page can have the look and feel of a specific site. The front end can also be used to create KeyMatches to insure a specific result is returned for a specific search term, or Related Queries to automatically return results for synonyms of a search term, and can apply additional filtering of the results.

The GSA administrators create collections and front ends, and then grant access to GSA managers who can edit them. The GSA managers are web professionals throughout IU; they are primarily campus web managers, but also include web professionals for other large units. To find out more about the collections, front ends, and managers, email Enterprise Web Tech Services.

For more, see the Google Search Appliance Overview.