Google has upgraded its search appliance for enterprises, adding mobile capabilities, the ability to search in the cloud and social networks and other features.

The company first launched the bright-yellow rack unit a decade ago to give enterprises a search engine they can use to look for information within their own networks that is as good as Google’s web search.

The product is addressing users’ frustration when they try to find information within their companies, as the volume of data companies store grows exponentially.

“Search should help your users, not become a source of frustration – especially as the volume of corporate content grows,” Matthew Eichner, general manager of enterprise search at Google, wrote in a blog post.

Eichner told Computerworld the company was “doubling down on enterprise search.” This is an unsolved problem, he said, and Google is going after some of the largest companies in the world to help solve problems with complexity.

With release of the latest Google Search Appliance (GSA) 7.0, customers can add content sources to the search. The sources can include internal storage, cloud services, the public Internet and social-networking sites.

Customers can also now use the GSA to search their SharePoint 2010 data.

Another major new feature is the employees’ ability to use any device (desktop, smartphone or tablet) to use the search engine.

Google has also improved the way the appliance determines how relevant a certain piece of information is to a certain user and added suggested-content capabilities like the ones its web search-engine has.

Google is not exactly the first company that comes to mind when one thinks of enterprise-hardware vendors, but it has massive hardware capabilities. It is a major server manufacturer, designing and building servers that live in its data centers around the world, powering its portfolio of web products and cloud services.