It's hard to conceptualize the number 1,000,000,000. One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years. Businesses and large organizations have tons of documents and other types of data — some even have a billion documents that need searching, and it's unlikely that employees have 2000 years to dedicate to the hunt.
Figuring out how to navigate the complex content systems of large organizations is a tough problem, one we've dedicated years to solving. Today we're releasing the newest version of our solution, the Google Search Appliance 6.0 (GSA), which has the capacity to search billions of documents. So whether you own a small business with a few thousand docs or belong to a huge organization with a billion, the GSA can search them all. Even if the content you need lives in a bunch of different departments or locations, in all kinds of formats, languages and repositories, the GSA makes searching within your organization as simple as searching on Google.com. It also has helpful features like user-added results and query suggestions, so over time your coworkers' input improves search results. The GSA 6.0 also is full of customization features, as well as flexible security policies so that each enterprise or large organizations can tweak the settings to suit its needs. We believe that setting your enterprise up with the GSA can save you tons of employee hours spent looking for data — letting you focus on the actual work to be done.
We demonstrated the infrastructure you'd actually need to search a billion docs — check it out in the video below. To learn more about the GSA 6.0 or our search solutions for businesses, check out the Google Enterprise Blog or our website.
If you're a local businesses, it's likely that Google plays a role in helping customers find you. And we're not just talking about your website — thanks to Google Maps and Google Search, you may also be getting a lot of online traffic to your business listing. You've probably seen one of these listings before:
You also probably know how they tend to work: A potential customer does a search on Google.com or in Google Maps, comes across your listing, clicks on it to see your reviews and details, and then gets directions to your location.
Now, imagine if there were a way for you to get a better understanding of how those customers are finding you. Did they search for "pizza" or "pasta" to get to the listing for your Italian restaurant? Do they live across town, but drive miles for your great selection of camping gear? What happens to traffic to your new dental practice when you start advertising in the local paper? With information like that, you'd be able to make better informed decisions on how to drive more traffic to your listing and attract more customers.
Later today, you'll be able to do just that, thanks to a new dashboard feature we're launching in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. All you have to do is claim your listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data:
Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.
The new dashboard will also let you dig into that data using all kinds of lists, maps, and graphs like this one, which measures impressions and actions for a hotel's business listing:
When you log in the the LBC today, you'll find that we've already populated the dashboards for claimed listings with data from the last 30 days. After that, new information will be added every day, so you can check in often to see how things are going. We're also working hard to add more historical information, and to make this available for businesses outside the U.S. All the data we share through the dashboard will be anonymous and aggregated, to protect the privacy of Google users.
We're really excited to be able to open up this data to local business owners. Before now, you could track usage metrics on your website using a tool like Google Analytics, but data about how customers found you in other ways never got back to you. That all changes today, and we think business owners will really get a lot out of this new information. So if you're a local business owner and you feel the same way, be sure to check out this new dashboard.
To learn more about accessing and using the dashboard, take a look at the video below and then visit the Lat Long Blog for a more in-depth overview.
Posted by Amer Shahnawaz, Software Engineer, Local Business Center
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