July 29, 2007

Google's Intranet Search Engine

Google Enterprise Blog shows a screenshot of MOMA Next, an experimental front-end for Google's intranet search. Google uses its own search appliance to index more than 100 million internal documents.

The familiar interface gives Google employees easy access to all kinds of data: contacts, shared bookmarks, refinements. Unfortunately, the design is kind of cluttered and the search takes a lot of time.


MOMA is the name of Google's intranet. An ex-Googler tells its story:

"MOMA was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn't serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry. MOMA displayed latency times, popular search terms, traffic stats for Google-owned properties and, at the center of it all, a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. (...)

I came to take it for granted that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company's history. (...)

Google eventually clamped down on who had access the complete state of the business; ostensibly because such information needed to be restricted unless everyone was going to be registered as an insider and restricted from freely buying and selling the company's stock."

Here's another screenshot from a MOMA search for Googlers (credit: The Back Pack Zac Attak).

6 comments:

  1. 18 seconds for search results is rediculous. That has to be some sort of mistake or weak/overloaded test system; not real world numbers. Google would never subject anyone to such latency. They love us all too much. And the search appliance does nothing but index and host searches. No one would ever wait 18 seconds for a search anyway. Google should change this screenshot. It could only serve to lower their sales numbers.

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  2. It's in the top right hand corner of the momma screen shot above.

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  3. Is Moma still up as Google's Intranet? It looks great. This may serve as a format for people who plan to make a company Intranet. There are also useful tips in Simpplr's blog: http://www.simpplr.com/blogs/.

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  4. This could have been great back in year 2007, but it is 2016 now and that really looks outdated (that is, if it is still working or not updated yet). Social intranets (http://www.simpplr.com/blogs/2015/11/what-makes-a-21st-century-intranet/) are those that rule now when it comes to company intranets.

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