Google is announcing a new version of the Google Search Appliance today -- version 6.8 of the company's enterprise search solution. The headline feature is "Cloud Connect" -- but that's in fact a pretty superficial addition. If you look at the technology, what's more interesting is that this release marks another small step in Google's long transition from fiction to reality.

As we've noted before, Google is slowly catching up with what it's been marketing for years. One milestone was version 6.2, which integrated the SharePoint connector onto the Appliance itself -- instead of requiring a stand-alone intermediary server. And a key example in the 6.8 release is dynamic navigation, also know as "faceted" search, or "guided navigation" (an Endeca trademark).

Here, too, there was a "Labs" feature for "results clustering", which looks similar on the screen, but was very limited in its usefulness. It would take the first 1000 results of a query, and then display clusters of those results as links to navigate. Not exactly how you'd drill down on thousands of documents to find the one match to your criteria.

In version 6.8, however, the facets are complete -- they're produced during the indexing, and actually cover the entire corpus, not just an on-the-fly subset. If you look at the screenshots, you'll now see that behind the facets in the navigation, there's actually an exact number. (A first for Google -- normally, as on the web, the number the engine displays is a pretty broad approximation.) That may not look like a big thing, but it will be if you're using it to dig through your fileserver or intranet. Because "refining" a search doesn't really work if, well, the navigation isn't very refined.

Of course, Google's implementation still isn't very sophisticated (or flexible). Test the Appliance carefully before you commit, and compare it to other vendor's products. The GSA's ease of use may outweigh the shortcomings; but you'll want to know exactly what the drawbacks are before your purchase. The Google Appliance isn't a cheap shortcut. It's much too expensive to be an impulse buy.