Google has released yet another version of the Google Search Appliance (GSA). It is good to see that Google stay active when it comes to improving their enterprise search product! Below is a list of the new features:
Dynamic navigation for secure search
The facet feature, new since 6.8, is still being improved. When filters are created, it is now possible to take in account that they only include secure documents, which the user is authorized to see.
Nested metadata queries
In previous Search Appliance releases there were restrictions for nesting meta tags in search queries. In this release many of those restrictions are lifted.
LDAP authentication with Universal Login
You can configure a Universal Login credential group for LDAP authentication.
Index removal and backoff intervals
When the Search Appliance encounters a temporary error while trying to fetch a document during crawl, it retains the document in the crawl queue and index. It schedules a series of retries after certain time intervals, known as “backoff” intervals. This before removing the URL from the index.
An example when this is useful is when using the processing pipeline that we have implemented for the GSA. GSA uses an external component to index the content, if that component goes down, the GSA will receive a “404 – page does not exist” when trying to crawl and this may cause mass removal from the index. With this functionality turned on, that can be avoided.
Specify URLs to crawl immediately in feeds
Release 6.12 provides the ability to specify URLs to crawl immediately in a feed by using the crawl-immediately attribute. This is a nice feature in order to prioritise what needs to get indexed quickly.
X-robots-tag support
The Appliance now supports the ability to exclude non-html documents by using the x-robots-tag. This feature opens the possibility to exclude non-html documents by using the x-robots-tag.