The OneBox feature will allow Google Search Appliances to find and present business data from applications by Oracle, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com, SAS, and Cognos, which announced extensions for OneBox.

The news will shore up Google's enterprise bona fides just one day before the company's first quarter earnings announcement. Brand and buzz aside, experts say Google still has a long way to go before it can compete head-to-head with pure-play enterprise search vendors.

The OneBox announcement will be part of a slew of enterprise-focused news Wednesday, including a new Enterprise Developer Community with SDKs, documentation and a forum for partners and developers to build applications around Google's enterprise search technology, and incremental feature and performance enhancements.

"OneBox" is a concept that is well established in Google's consumer search services. It refers to the ability of the search engine to highlight specific types of dynamic information, like weather or stock prices, in the search results, along with static search results. For example, a search for "Boston weather" will return a high-level link with the forecast for Boston, Massachusetts.

Coupled with Google Search Appliance, OneBox allows information from business applications, such as contacts, calendar entries, sales leads or purchase orders to be searched and returned in a way that is easily grasped by the user, said David Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google's Enterprise business unit.