Google reported today that they have released version 5 of their "Google in a box" enterprise search appliance. The new release adds support for Windows Integrated Authentication, secured crawling and serving of corporate files, and the addition of a number of new "connectors" which allow the appliance to extend search into various specialized databases and storage containers.

Although Google claims some moderately impressive growth numbers and that 10,000 companies are currently using the appliance, I have yet to run across one in the wild. I'd be interested in hearing more about their capabilities and field performance from anyone currently using one; they seem like a nifty solution of exactly the sort that I prefer (in a box!) but other than for web-facing integration, many companies don't seem sufficiently adapted to the "search as a file structure" concept to make good use of them.

See the press release here.