When we discuss improvements to search technology, we tend to focus on the open web while overlooking its more novel uses behind the firewall. So it’s good to point out advancements being made behind the scenes from time to time, even if consumers don’t directly benefit.
Paglo is a Palo Alto-based startup launching a product into public beta today that empowers IT professionals with keyword search. Its crawler doesn’t index documents, images, and other forms of media found on the internet. Rather, it identifies the resources within a corporate or organizational network (such as devices, users, and software) and essentially makes the information available about them Google-able.
Since Paglo is a hosted solution, IT departments need only to install an open source crawler that will send indexed data to Paglo’s servers, where they are held in a designated silo. We’re told the process of setting up Paglo for a given department takes only minutes, after which IT admins can sign in from anywhere to search their networks.
In addition to simple keyword search, users can set up Google Alert-like notifications for when certain changes occur within a network (for example, when memory gets low on a particular machine). Search queries can be saved as tables, graphs or lists and displayed alongside each other on a dashboard for quick viewing. These queries can also be shared through a built-in community with other IT admins who might be interested in seeing how you keep tabs on your resources.
Paglo signed up 800 companies during its private beta period, which started last Fall. The service will remain completely free through at least the summer, after which it will be sold on a subscription basis.