Smash hit

However, Google is targeting the low end of the market. Today it also revealed a "next generation" of its Google Mini products, faster search tools for small- and medium-sized businesses, which start at £1,295 for a system that can search 50,000 documents.

GSA will play a central part in Google’s self-chosen mandate to make all of the world’s information usefully accessible, a task Eric Schmidt, the company’s chief executive recently estimated could take as long as 300 years.

The company believes that more than half of the digital information stored globally is held internally by companies.

To ease access to it, Google today announced seven partnerships with IT companies including Oracle, Cognos, Cisco, and salesforce.com, who have agreed to adapt their products to make the information stored in them more accessible to GSA.

The inclusion of Oracle, which recently trumpeted its own entry into the enterprise search market, marked a new era in relationships between technology companies, Mr Glotzbach said.

"I’ve heard this kind of relationship described as ‘co-opetition,’" he said. "I think we’re going to see more of it as the business landscape continues to change. Companies are going to have to co-operate and compete to be successful.

Larry Ellison, the Oracle chief executive recently said that his company’s Enterprise Search 10g product performed a function "very similar to what Google does, but you’re not crawling the public internet. You’re crawling and indexing all of your private databases, Microsoft Word files and all your data and building in a separate Oracle database all these indexes."

GSA will not index a company’s information but will send out "real-time" requests from users and provide results that are ordered by relevance using similar methods as google.com.

Google, which claims to have the world’s largest group of engineers working on search and retrieval, says it aims to leverage work in areas such as video search to improve its enterprise product.

Mr Glatzbach said that the Google brand would be key in differentiating it from rivals such as Autonomy.

The emphasis on corporate products comes as Google faces pressure to show that it is able to diversify away from its core search-advertising business, which accounts for around 95 per cent of its revenues.

The company recently announced a partnership with BearingPoint, the former consulting arm of KPMG, to increase its presence in enterprise search and to bring on board expertise on security issues.

Pricing for the GSA is based on the number of documents consumers search across, Google said.

In the US, Google's initial license point will index up to 500,000 documents for $30,000 (£16,800). The Google Search Appliance is offered as a two-year license and includes support, hardware replacement coverage and software updates.

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