One on One with Nitin Mangtani of Google Search Appliance

Nitin Mangtani is the lead product manager for the Google Search Appliance (GSA). In this role, Nitin focuses on defining enterprise search strategy, establishing the product road map and defining new releases for the GSA. There have been several pieces, published in this space, on the difficulty of enterprise search and what happens when you move consumer-style Google search to the enterprise.

Recently, Mangtani surprised a few people when he published an SAP-sponsored editorial on Forbes.com in which he basically defended Google enterprise search against critics. It was a bold move. It prompted me to write to him and ask some questions of my own about his reason for publishing the Forbes piece and his rebuttal to Google Search Appliance critics.

FCM: You gave a spirited defense of your product in Forbes. What prompted you to react in that forum in that fashion?

NM: Our words are a reflection of our commitment to enterprise search. At Google, we are constantly innovating to ensure that our search solutions for the enterprise are as powerful and easy to use as Google.com. It's important to us that everyone--from CIOs to IT admins to employees--hear how we're taking our online search expertise, and tailoring that experience to meet the specific needs of businesses large and small.

FCM: Google's PageRank is the frequently touted "secret sauce" for the web-based search experience. Yet the majority of content in enterprise is not web-native content. How does Google adjust the search relevancy strategy for a non-hyperlinked body of content?

NM: Google has made a name for serving the most relevant results. In the workplace, the more relevant your results, the easier and faster you can get your job done. Speed and relevance are the twin pillars of a successful search, and are our primary focus in delivering search solutions for enterprise customers.

It's important to understand that PageRank is just one of the many signals we use to determine relevancy for Google.com. Similarly, in the enterprise, there's no one signal we rely on to deliver results. The Google Search Appliance leverages the technology tested daily by millions of users at Google.com, but also incorporates algorithms and models that we develop exclusively to suit the challenges of an enterprise search environment.

To meet these challenges, we have some of the best and brightest engineers in the world working on enterprise search. Our dedicated team is made up of experts in information retrieval, putting the power of PhDs and years of experience to work for our customers. If there's any secret to our strategy, it's simply that we don't let our recipe for search get cold. Our secret sauce is a team committed to innovation, and delivering the truly useful results that allow businesses to focus on business goals.

FCM: Along the same lines, I think Google loses its advantage inside the enterprise where there are fewer likely correct choices. As one analyst puts it, it's far easier to find a correct document among many correct answers, more difficult when there are only one or two correct ones. How does Google compensate for this difference?

NM: We find that end users in the enterprise often need to perform both functions, whether it's finding a specific document, or more general information discovery. Our goal is to make sure they can tackle both of these tasks with ease.

In both instances, relevance is key--and our ability to deliver relevant results is unmatched. One way we achieve relevance is through the personalization of search results. With the Google Search Appliance, administrators can adjust search results for different user groups, based on department or function. This means engineers see code and design documents at the top of their search results, while employees in marketing department see market analysis and white papers at the top of search results for the same query.

For the employee who doesn't know exactly what they're looking for, we also dynamically cluster results, which allows users to drill down on information through automatically generated categories. This allows employees to pull information from related areas and projects, often leading to the discovery new information they didn't know existed.

And for those looking for information residing in enterprise applications, like SAP or an employee directory, we provide an Enterprise OneBox that pulls information directly from across a business' enterprise applications. That way employees looking for the Q4 sales report or the status of a purchase order can find it all from the convenience of their search box.

Providing the best search possible isn't just about returning results. It's about understanding the nature of the search query and the searcher. Our search solutions are designed to take both into account, and to get better over time by learning the types of results that are most useful to you.

FCM: Carl Frappaolo of AIIM has said that what makes enterprise search so difficult is what he calls the "digital landfill" of information, data that is spread out across repositories in the enterprise. How does Google enterprise search get at this type of information locked away in a variety of repositories?

NM: This is one area where our experience online has taught us an important lesson. Whether searching online at home, or behind the firewall at work, employees want to have all their results accessible through one search box.

We call this universal search. In the same way we pull together web pages, news, blogs, financial quotes and more online, we've designed our enterprise search to pull results from across business infrastructure, including intranets, databases, portal servers, fileshares and content management systems, like Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Livelink and Microsoft Sharepoint. We provide native connectors that allow businesses to index data from their various repositories, and our built-in Content Connector Framework gives businesses the flexibility to build the custom connections they may need.

Pulling all this information together certainly isn't easy, but its our job to ensure that from a user's perspective, everything they need is at their fingertips. Our universal search ensures that employees can find information, no matter where or how it's stored, while our expertise delivering fast, relevant results ensures they can act on the information they uncover.

FCM: In my view, based on my conversations with industry experts over the years, the Google Appliance is an excellent choice for a department, but not so great for an enterprise-wide search tool that crosses departments, repositories and data types. Why do you think I'm wrong about this conclusion?

NM: I think the best way to answer this is with the response we've gotten from our customers. We have more than 20,000 customers using our search solutions, encompassing a range of business sizes and types, and many of these are large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies.

Kimberly Clark, a Fortune 500 company known for brands such as Huggies and Kleenex, is a fantastic example of a large company faced with precisely the dilemma you outlined. They had millions of documents across a range of departments and repositories, and they needed a solution that could bring it all together. With the Google Search Appliance, employees can now search more than 22 million documents from across their company intranet, as well as web applications, homegrown document management systems, filer servers, and their public internet site. And best of all, they were able to install the search appliance quickly, and with minimal training for employees who were already used to the Google.com search experience.

Honeywell International, a leader in the tech manufacturing industry, is another great example of a large enterprise using the Google Search Appliance with great success. Honeywell needed a solution that could power both their internal search, as well as the external search on their public website. The Google Search Appliance addressed both of these needs, and was optimized and serving results within a day.

The range of customers we serve, again, speaks to the flexibility of our search solutions for the enterprise. Whether a small business with a rapidly growing number of files to manage, or a large business with content buried across databases and departments, our search solutions can scale and be tailored to meet a range of different needs from across the business community.

FCM: Users are always saying they want the Google consumer experience in the enterprise, but you don't seem to have the same success there you have on the web, why do you think that is?

NM: Our corporate motto at Google is "focus on the user and all else will follow". In the case of enterprise search, users are demanding the Google experience they know, trust and depend on. We can't think of anyone in a better position to provide this experience than us.

We hear from many of the businesses we work with how glad they are to have a solution at work that is as easy to use as Google.com. Our solution saves time and money by being easy to set up and maintain, and saves businesses the worry of needing to provide extensive training to employees who already understand and trust the experience they get with Google.

Success has many forms. If our success is judged by adoption, then we stand by the 20,000 customers using our search solutions. If it's judged by commitment to innovation, then we stand by our continued deployment of new products and improvements. And if it's judged by end user experience, then we absolutely stand by the power and simplicity of the search solution we provide to our customers. Search for us is never a solved problem, and in our minds, the best is yet to come.