It’s hilarious to me that the Google Search Appliance looks like a rack mounted The Cheat. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google’s partnership with Dell to distribute enterprise level search solutions using Google’s algorithms, they have been making a splash in server rooms all over the place. On the Google Blog, they discuss how these new search appliances are plug and play goliaths, capable of indexing corporate content like no other and compatible with a wide variety of applications, security setups, and data repositories.
What’s the internet marketing application? Well, the first thing I can see happening with this is using these internal search engines to index all the marketing information the company processes. If that’s easy as Google and Dell make it sound, then you’d be able to quickly pull (using Analytics) the popularity of new marketing materials with your production staff. Are they using it? Which documents are getting the most traffic and clicks? It’d be a great, lazy way to verify that your vision is getting properly implemented. You could also use it to query your PPC and SEO work logs, to see if there are any other cathode lighting clients who you’ve had a hard time getting PPC traffic before noon, or if decreasing the size of your title tags from 70 to 63 characters really makes a difference.