Google’s Enterprise Search offerings have steadily grown in both strength and innovation over the past few years. As we reported in June, Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Most recently, Google improved the scalability of its enterprise search appliance (also known as the GSA), allowing businesses to search billions of documents. Today, Google added two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both available in Google’s Enterprise Labs, which is similar to Gmail Labs.

Side-by-Side search lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries (Policy A vs. Policy B) on the same data, to see which gives better results. Employees can vote on their preferred results, by clicking on either the Policy A or Policy B button and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business. It seems that this feature would be useful to administrators who are constantly trying to make internal search capabilities more effective.

Google is also offering a new tool that lets businesses connect to different types of data, both online and offline, for search functionality. The GSA connector has been updated to search across content management systems of enterprises (such as SharePoint, FileNet, etc). Google also now provides a connector specifically for Salesforce data, so the GSA can include internal Salesforce data in search results.