Trouble searching your intranet?

Interesting article on ZDNET.com.au, which reports on Royal & Sun Alliance cutting the search times for its intranet from 5-7 minutes (crikey!), to less than a second by using Google's Enterprise Search Appliance.

[...Royal & Sun Alliance knowledge manager Tony Brierley said the intranet is used by the company's underwriters to pull up information when dealing with brokers' enquiries. Underwriters require information such as rates or company policy guidelines that is stored on the intranet.

Brierley told ZDNet Australia's sister site silicon.com the company had a legacy of different search tools within the intranet, which is based on a Lotus Notes backbone. Interoperability problems between these systems slowed searches to an unacceptable level.

"Users told us that the information they found was good, but finding it was often impossible. Feedback on the Google application has been very good. People say they can actually find things now."

He said the Google Search Appliance has improved the quality of information that is available on the intranet, because it allows users to view PDF and PowerPoint documents. It also self-calibrates every 24 hours, stripping out links to documents that no longer exist and 'spidering' new entries so that they are available to user...]

I'm sure similar issues face a large number of organizations, especially the legacy issue with Lotus Notes, but how many would this solution be right for? It says a lot that a big insurance company, with all the inevitable concerns about privacy and data protection, chose Google to solve this problem.