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Google Businesses The Internet Data Storage IT

Google In A Box 29

Posted by timothy from the besides-everybox dept.
26199 writes "The BBC is reporting on an interesting product from Google -- a shiny yellow box to add to your server rack. The box is a Linux computer, and it provides Google search facilities for your company's intranet. Just remember to think about the security implications before you install one... the article does a good job of discussing the risks." As the article points out, in-house google boxes are not a brand-new product, but now they're pushing them harder.
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Google In A Box

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  • That seems cool... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SoCalChris ( 573049 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @01:01PM (#10576810) Journal
    But $34,000 for a two year license on their most basic plan seems pretty steep.

    They keep talking about how they are expecting the corporate search market to take off, but it probably won't at that price.

    These have been out for a few years now, has anyone ever heard of any company shelling out for one? (Besides the companies listed in the article)

    • Re:That seems cool... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 )
      At that price you could hire a geeky teenager to search for stuff on your network.
    • Let's see if I got this straight. $17,000 a year to have a bot scan and record everything on my network while I pray that it doesn't get hacked. OR Take this crappy little 400Mhz box sitting here gathering dust, install Linux, set up a bot of my own and run it for free...and maybe charge my own company $10,000 a year (a savings of $7,000 a year!) Hmmm....

    • Re:That seems cool... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ghostlibrary ( 450718 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @02:34PM (#10578095) Homepage Journal
      I wrote in another thread long ago about these. Actually, the price point is excellent.

      Choice A: Write an in-house app and keep it up to date and useful. Assume a half-timer to write this in 4 months plus another half-timer to do the UI, then a half-timer to debug/test it in 4 months because it didn't quite work right, plus a quarter time sysadmin for it since it's going to be high load.

      Already we're 8 months into developing this and don't actually _have_ a working search engine, and we've blown 2/3rds of a yearly FTE. And that's being generously low in my staffing estimates.

      Choice B: Toss google half a yearly FTE in pay to do it for you, and it's ready in a week, up, working stable, and you don't have to _do_ anything. And you get free maintenance and updates.

      Easy choice, if you're a real company. And yes, I've worked at a place that finally got one of these-- they're great. Incredibly useful, and a big cost savings.
      • Choice C: Use Google Desktop Search. It's free, you just write an adapter to it. But you have to use Windows servers though. :-)
      • The main advantage to Google from an end user's point is the ranking algorithm which may be of dubious value for smaller sites. For $17000 per year, you can pay for a lot of maintenance and customization of your own search engine. It would be re-inventing the wheel, and not necessarily a better wheel, to write a search engine from scratch.

        No need to write one from scratch, there are plenty out there [searchtools.com] including some not on the list [lub.lu.se]. Some of these are quite customizable, you can prune various servers, direc

  • So, what's new here? (Score:2, Informative)

    by gabe ( 6734 )
    The Google Appliance [google.com] has been around for years.
    • Now they are acutally "pushing" them, they have a PR department to get it out through different "media channels". /. the source for products that are not out yet, products that will never come out, and NOW the products that have been around for years, had no significant changes, but you should care, for... some... reason.
    • And so has this article.

      I can't track it down but the same "news" was reported 2 or 3 years ago likely making this is the most delayed dupe ever. A new Slashdot record!
  • We considered buying it early last spring. I don't know how old it was then.

  • Last time I checked, Google Appliance was not indexing file shares - http only.
    My buddy's company makes appliance that does. And it costs 10% of Google's.
    See my sig for details ;-)

  • How 'bout gmail servers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @04:39PM (#10579485) Homepage
    I really dig the gmail interface. I'd kick squirrelmail to the curb in my shop if I could have an in-house gmail server.

    Any news on gmail-in-a-box offerings?

  • Save the $30k or more and use COTS hardware with mnogosearch [mnogo.ru] or htdig [htdig.org] (or ...)
  • $34000 is indeed quite steep. People could install google desktop (http://desktop.google.com/ [google.com]) on their individual desktops and search it for free. Of course there's no easy way to search EVERY computer in your LAN.

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