Google has updated its rack-mountable enterprise Google Search Appliance.

Known for its distinctive bright yellow colour scheme, the unit searches corporate databases in a method similar to Google's online search engine.

Google claimed that the latest upgrade brings its enterprise search offering more inline with its web search.

The new Search Appliance provides "universal search" abilities which can perform searches not just in one or more databases, but in all places where enterprise data is stored.

The device supports searching in intranets, applications and hosted services, and can handle 220 different document formats.

Google said that the new Search Appliance will also be able to run within enterprise content management systems.

By way of an open source framework, users will be able to integrate the Search Appliance with IBM's Filenet, EMC's Documentum, Microsoft's SharePoint and OpenText's Livelink.

Google has also upgraded the device to support Microsoft's Integrated Windows Authentication network security protocol, and has enhanced the security in the document crawling and file serving systems.

Google has launched an online Enterprise Lab to promote the appliance and let customers test experimental and upcoming enterprise search tools.