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Challenge |
Overview
Founded in 1959, the Santa Clara, California-based National
Semiconductor Corporation produces chips that power mobile and cordless
phones, wired and wireless local area networks, TV set-top boxes, DVD
players, and a host of other electronic devices that connect people
to information.
In the complex and rapidly changing chip design and production business,
efficient exchange of information between employees is critical to success.
The Challenge
Bill Corley, National Semiconductor's manager of intranet
technology, was charged with finding a new intranet search solution
for more than 10,000 company employees worldwide.
"With our old search engine, employees had to make several queries
to find the right document," explains Corley. "We needed a
solution that could scale with the growth of information inside National,
while at the same time helping employees quickly find the information
they need."
The National Semiconductor intranet is distributed over more than 200
servers globally and contains more than 500,000 documents, including
HTML, Microsoft Office, and PDF documents.
The Solution
National Semiconductor chose the GB-8008 to simplify
corporate search for administrators and employees.
"Google delivered the GB-8008 in the morning, and we had it crawling
and indexing on our network that afternoon. It's amazing how simple
it was to install," says Corley. "What's more, the Google
Search Appliance is easy to administer and saves time by streamlining
the process of finding and organizing all our intranet data. In fact,
with Google, we doubled the number of documents our employees can search."
Besides doubling the size of the index, the increased throughput of
the Google crawler and indexer enabled Corley to improve the refresh
rate for the index by a factor of four over the previous search engine.
"Where the old engine indexed 2,500 documents an hour, the Google
Search Appliance indexes roughly 25,000. This allows us to completely
reindex the documents of relevance in about twelve hours, so we don't
have to worry about incremental indexing. Adding subcollections is also
very easy, with no need for a separate crawl and index for that content."
Corley also appreciates Google's open-standards approach, notably the
ability to run transformations on search data. "When we look at
where we're going with other applications and Web services in general,
clearly that's a benefit." 1
End Result
"The number of searches performed each day has
more than doubled," adds Corley. "Our employees are inspired
to use our intranet search when they hear it's powered by Google. They
love Google because it helps them to be more productive."
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate
search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology
to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available
in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies,
the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing
websites and company-wide intranet applications, and the GB-8008 for
centralized deployments supporting global business units.
1 Quoted in InternetWeek, June 18, 2002.
Contact sales for more information.
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