Google has announced "Google OneBox," an extension to its search appliance that enables it to retrieve data from various enterprise applications like Cognos and Salesforce.com. Prominently missing are SAP and Microsoft, two big important sources of enterprise content -- who are feverishly working on their own search technologies. OneBox also introduces a developer API for building connectors to other applications, much like you can with the major pure-play search vendors. For enterprise deployments, this makes sense, but each new step to accomodate the heterogeneous collections of enterprise repositories makes Google's product less of a plug-and-play appliance and more like the complex search technologies Google is trying to replace. Enterprise search is hard, folks...