The Google Search Server

An anonymous reader submitted a reasonably indepth review of the Google search appliance. The guys from anandtech put it through it's paces, and included a variety of pictures and comments on one of those Google products most of us will probably never play with.

Neat insides

[AKAImBatman]

Let's see here:

1. Took lots of pretty pictures [Check]
2. Tore the box apart wondering if we could finally find a flux capacitor [Check]
3. Tried to play with all the hardware and software we've been encouraged to leave alone. [Check]
4. Actually tested how the device performed doing its intended function? [Why would you want to do that?]

Re:Google ate my server

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately I had a poorly secured application that Google was able to sneak into via another link I wasn't aware of. It held the custom links for each of our departments to display a personalized set of links on the home page. Unfortunately it went through the admin tool and clicked every delete link it could find.

Sounds like it wasn't much of an admin tool if it required no authorization...any employee could have done what Google did, just not as quickly.

OS

[Anonymous Coward]

So what os does this thing run and why is it not mentioned anywhere?

Re:Google ate my server

[iluvcapra]

Don't ridicule his misery, AC, unless you're willing to post your name. Someday, once you graduate from high school, you will encounter this situation and you'll wish you weren't so critical.

Re:Review? & capacity

[Manitcor]

If your not careful when setting up your crawlers many search engines will index every link they find in a document. Including the headers and footers on the page that point to About, Legal, Copyright, Sponsors and Links.

Depending on how you have configured things it may also go ahead and read your banner ads and such as well. If you havent expliclty told your crawler to stay within someurl.com then it will go ahead and index the links that go to outside sites as well.

The solution that was presented in the article is a very common one when you want to simply index a subset of site content. Another common method for crawl systems that support scripting (like Plumtree's Ripfire or Verity) is to parse out the various urls you are looking for explicity as well as handle for things like pagination.

The former is perffered as it can easily be adapted to work with other search engines without re-writing custom scripts. I would not be surprised if anandtech now detects when GoogleBot is crawling thier site and presents GoogleBot as well as other search bots with the same page that thier applicance sees.

Re:It looks like the OS is WINDOWS

[coconutstudio]

OS it is running is RedHat Linux. The IE you are seeing is from the client machine, which happens to be Win. You can't access the server directly, only via the web interface.

Google on Time4ink.com

[RobHeritage]

We looked into the testing of the Google appliance for searching our printer ink [time4ink.com] site. We found using our Google ad sense account gave our printer ink customers the ability to search our site and suited our small business needs just fine. You can see our search box at the top of our site let's the search happy people search away. If they go somewhere else we felt being a directory will allow us to keep them coming back due to our printer help sections. Why buy a big Google [google.com] appliance??? -- Especially with the fees. I know some techies would disagree and want better control over their pages, but so far we have had great results having clients actually find what cartridge they are looking for by model number or keyword specific terms.