Enterprise Search with Google Cloud Search – A Beginner’s Guide

Google Cloud Search as a Foundation for an Enterprise Search

Google Cloud Search is one of the leading search engines and offers the means to find the right answers and insights for the tasks, you have at hand. By default Google Cloud Search already surfaces Google Drive, Google Contacts, Google Sites, Gmail and more Google Workspace content sources in its OOTB search experience, cloudsearch.google.com**. Moreover, it offers query APIs which allow to build tailored search experiences and also allows for indexing third-party content sources. Thus, Google Cloud Search, with all its power of a great relevance model, is a sound and solid foundation for your enterprise search.

** Please note that this link only works if you are Cloudsearch enabled. If you are not yet enabled, please reach out to us.

How Does Google Cloud Search Index Third-Party Content Sources?

It is quite easy to integrate third-party sources, such as Atlassian Confluence, ServiceNow or OpenText Content Server, in order to make Google Cloud Search a fully featured enterprise search. To get started, you need to have a quota for the Google Cloud Search. A quota becomes available through enterprise plus licenses, or you can purchase additional quota through partners, like Raytion.

Right now, each Enterprise Plus seat allows for indexing 1,000 documents (starting at 500 licensed seats). If this quota is available, you can index third party contents into Google Cloud Search through connectors or web crawlers. Google itself offers open-source connectors for file shares, databases, web sites and SharePoint on-premises, as well as SharePoint Online. On the other hand, Raytion offers all its enterprise search connectors also for Google Cloud Search.

What Is Needed to Index and Display New Content Sources?

Set up and configure the following components to index other content sources:

1. The Connector. You need to deploy and configure the respective connector, so that indexing can generally take place.
2. Create an service account to enable access to Google APIs for the connector.
3. Within the Google Workspace administration, you need to create a
   • Data Source, i.e., the search index
   • Identity Source, i.e., the principal store, which is needed for security trimming
4. Finally, you need to add the new data source to an existing search application or create a new one.  

 Search Experience and User Journeys

Having the data of the content source indexed is the first step towards a great enterprise search. You can configure the search application in Google Cloud Search to display these results in a nice way. This step is easily done as part of the general connector setup and schema registration and our Raytion Connectors already provide everything needed for this configuration.

Many organizations, however, have their special needs for their enterprise search. Because a great search experience helps users to solve their current tasks faster, it is worth to invest into a tailored enterprise search experience too. Here you can consider using an integration of Google Cloud Search into the intranet via a Search-as-you-Type. You can also consider a standalone search center, such as the Raytion Search & Retrieval Interface. These search experiences rely on the availability of Google Cloud Search’s query APIs. We are pleased to help if you are not sure if these APIs are available in your Google tenant.

Who Needs to Be Involved in the Configuration Process?

The involved persons are the content source owners or administrators, who are active during the configuration of a connector. Other involved people can be the Google Workspace and GCP administrators, who are active for the service account registration and the setup of the search connection and search experience.

The Outcome

Google Cloud Search is a solid and state-of-the-art foundation for a great enterprise search. Many organizations have a free quota due to their Enterprise Plus Seats which allow for integrating more content sources. This is done either with the open-source connectors by Google or for instance our Raytion Enterprise Search Connectors. Even more, you can build customized and tailored search experiences based on Google Cloud Search, for instance based on our Raytion Search & Retrieval Interface.

If you are interested in more information on how to build an enterprise search based on Google Cloud Search, please reach out to our experts.