Google Search Appliance has been around for about a decade, and today, the box has received a new update with version 7.0. This version adds universal search, refined relevance signals and some other bells and whistles.

“The GSA 7.0 helps you find information stored anywhere in your organization, whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet,” says Matthew Eichner, General Manager, Enterprise Search at Google. “Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites. GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience.”

“Users are happy when they get relevant results returned quickly,” says Eichner. “At Google, speed and relevance are the core components of a great search experience. With GSA 7.0, we’ve refined our relevance signals so that the most useful information for each particular user is always easy to find. Assisted navigation makes it easy to refine search results, and requires no manual configuration from administrators. Entity Recognition automatically identifies and suggests content you might be looking for, and GSA 7.0 also harnesses the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ allowing employees to add their own search results.”

The new GSA also comes with document preview, Google Translate, updated language capabilities, a new interface and improved scale. You can view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews alongside search results. Search results can be displayed in over 60 languages. According to Google, a single rack of GSAs could now fit the equivalent of the entire Google.com index in 2000 (a billion pages).