All went well with the GSA version 5.2 update. The update itself is a humongous 1.53 GB ISO file that, once burned to a DVD disc and loaded, took about 6 hours to install. As recommended, we did a complete crawl refresh which, in our case, took another 72 hours. Other than this considerable but necessary time investment, we had no real problems with the update process.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the principal attraction of this most recent GSA update was the integration of Google Apps, which enables targeting of domain-hosted Google Docs and Google Sites. In that regard we are pleased to report no problema, as well.

In version GSA 5.2 the administrator now sees a menu option for “Google Apps Integration” with a single field for enabling or disabling one’s Google Apps domain as a GSA target:

With Google Apps targeted generally, then it is a matter of constructing URL patterns to include or exclude more specifically what you want targeted within your Google Apps. In our case, that meant our selection of specific Google Sites now serving as our organization’s intranet content platform. More specifically our search goal was to have the GSA index not just pages within those Google Sites but, as importantly, files uploaded to those Google Sites.

There are differences in how search results display between those performed from within Google Sites and those from a GSA frontend. If a search is done from within Sites, it will find and return a search result for keywords or phrases within an uploaded file, but not display the context of the keywords or phrase. For example, using the search law school+"reimburse me" one gets this specific PDF search result from within Google Sites:

The same search done from our test GSA frontend that returns results from everything targeted by our GSA, yields the same search result while showing the keywords and phrase in context:

So, the basic differences in how search results display are these:

An internal Google Site search will find and return results based on keywords and/or phrase within a file uploaded to Google Sites, display the filetype as an icon (in the above example, with a PDF icon), display the link using the file name, but not display the keywords or phrases in context.

In contrast, the GSA search result will find and return the same result but display the keywords and/or phrase in context, display the filetype as an acronym (e.g., “PDF”), and display the link as what the algorithm discerns as the document’s title (in this example, “Law School Loan Reimbursement Request Form”).