GSA virtual edition + VMware = experience enterprise search

This post is primarily targeted at my IT allies within the legal services community and other non-profit organizations following this project, who may be interested in trying out the Google Search Appliance but aren’t prepared to make the hardware investment as yet, even for a more modest Google Mini.

Here’s the deal: Now there’s a software alternative to get the full-on GSA experience for free. Sort of. Pretty much. At least up to 50,000 documents.

Early last month Google announced the availability of the fully functional (albeit limited to 50,000 documents) Google Search Appliance virtual edition. The GSA virtual edition is “a developer platform designed for the enterprise development community to build and test applications that use the Google Search Appliance. The Google Search Appliance virtual edition is for non-commercial, development purposes only. Developers can simply download the software-only product, try out the new features and explore the various programmatic interfaces supported by the Google Search Appliance.”

To exploit this opportunity, you need a server that is supported by VMWare virtualization. Here’s the rudimentary technical FAQs about the virtual edition. The Google Code site does incude a page about installing the virtual edition and access to basic GSA documentation, but does not include the extensive additional online documentation that comes with the fully licensed GSA hardware or any direct support.