Search appliance

A search appliance (SA) is a type of computer appliance which is attached to a corporate network for the purpose of indexing the content shared across that network in a way that is similar to a web search engine.

Commercial examples

Google has two SAs, one for large networks and one for smaller networks. They both use Google's proprietary indexing formula to display results in order of relevance. The way it finds data is very similar to Google Desktop Search. All the data that is to be indexed must be stored in a folder that would be accessible by a web browser. This means that each computer to be indexed must include a web server of some type or a copy of Google's computer indexing service (Google Desktop Search).