Announcing the Google Search Appliance virtual edition for developers

By Vivek Haldar, Enterprise Search Team

Ever wanted to write code against Google search technology, test your apps, and see how it all integrates into your development environment without having to pay a thing? If you're an IT administrator, you'll have that chance with the new virtual edition of the Google Search Appliance. The Google Search Appliance virtual edition is for non-commercial, development purposes only, and gives developers the opportunity to test against the features of the physical Google Search Appliance.

The Google Search Appliance virtual edition provides a free test bed for the Google Search Appliance - our solution for securely searching enterprise content behind the corporate firewall - helping ensure a smooth transition to the production-ready hardware. If your organization is considering adopting an enterprise search solution, the virtual edition platform gives your team the flexibility to build applications against the Google Search Appliance, try different configuration scenarios, explore proofs-of-concept and test the APIs supported by Google enterprise search technology. As part of testing with the virtual edition, you can:

• Index up to 50,000 documents
• Use the Connector Framework to index proprietary document repositories
• Use the Feed API and metadata search to index information with unique formats
• Use Onebox to retrieve information from real-time services
• Take the authentication and secure search capabilities for a test drive
• Customize the search results page, or extract it in XML format for use on another web site

These features might come in handy, particularly if your existing environment contains the array of legacy systems, databases, servers and integration architecture typical of most large organizations. And because it's free, your boss might give you an extra week's vacation just for trying it out (don't quote us on that). You can download Google Search Appliance virtual edition software onto any server that is supported by VMWare virtualization. To learn more and get started, click here. And since we always love feedback, feel free to drop by our developer community or send your thoughts to enterprise-gsa-virtual@google.com.