Google has opened up a new front in its mission to make available all of the world’s information, launching a renewed assault on the multi-billion-dollar corporate search market and announcing partnerships with several major IT players – including a number of potential rivals.

The company today revealed the Google Search Appliance (GSA), a product that allows employees of large companies to search internal information ranging from sales figures to HR data through a single screen modelled on Google’s flagship search website.

Google said the application has been designed to cope with the current explosive growth of information held by companies.

According to Google, employees spend as much as a quarter of their time searching for information and that the amount of data held by companies is growing by between 40 per cent and 70 per cent a year.

This growth is fuelling the enterprise search market, which combined with closely associated services for processing information such as e-mail, is estimated to be worth up to $70 billion a year - around four times as much as that for databases.

"Content explosion is happening," Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s head of enterprise products, said.

"Companies have to deal with it if they want to compete. Google wants to use its experience in web search to provide a ‘fast front door’ to that information – one that doesn’t require any special training for users."

However, Dr Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy Corporation, the current market leader, said that enterprise search is split into several distinct areas and that Google does not have the expertise to tap growth sectors.

Autonomy expects basic search services to become free by the end of this year but for the market for more sophisticated systems designed for large companies to remain robust.

"Internet and enterprise search are very different areas. There is a history of internet search companies thinking they can do enterprise search but falling down," Dr Lynch told Times Online.

He estimates that large firms have information stored on an average of 300 different IT systems, many of which are incompatible and aging.

Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner, said: "The line of appliances Google sells for enterprise search is increasingly popular. It solves many basic problems effectively, but fails to address many needs for sophisticated projects."

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