Google Search Appliance Connectors Administration Guide - Manual (Page 5)

1 About Connectors 4.0
Google Search Appliance connectors enable the Google Search Appliance to acquire
content from external repositories and provide that content in search results. A Google
Search Appliance with configured connectors can perform fast, unified, secure search
across multiple systems and document repositories.
A fundamental strength of the search appliance is discovering enterprise content in web
pages and indexing it. The GSA accomplishes this by crawling the web pages over
HTTP/HTTPS, following hyperlinks within the pages to interrelated web pages, and adding
the content it discovers to the search index. Ultimately, the GSA serves content from its
index as search results to end users.
However, many organizations have content that is stored in repositories, such as
SharePoint and Windows file shares, rather than on web pages. Because documents in
repositories are not usually interrelated through hyperlinks, the search appliance cannot
find this content through normal crawling.
Connectors 4.0 exploit the search appliance’s strengths by enabling it to crawl non-web
content in repositories over HTTP/HTTPS. Additionally, connectors can feed groups
information to the search appliance. Groups information can restrict the visibility of certain
content to members of particular groups by using Access Control Lists (ACLs).
The search appliance adds content acquired through connectors to the search index and
uses credentials provided by connectors to protect secure content.
There are several ways to model and communicate your repository's contents to the GSA,
and Adaptors are one of them. For other possible solutions, look into
Connectors 3.x and
Content Feeds . Connectors 3.x support older GSA versions. Content Feeds should be used
when the repository does not provide random document access and instead only provides
changes occurring in the repository.