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Google Businesses The Internet IT

Google Announces 'Mini' Search Appliance 215

Posted by michael from the feeling-lucky dept.
demetrio writes "In an effort to cater to small business search needs, Google has announced a new search appliance dubbed the 'Mini'. Priced at $5,000, well below the starting price of $32,000 for its other appliances, the 'Mini' should help smaller businesses leverage Google's search expertise at an affordable price."
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Google Announces 'Mini' Search Appliance More

Google Announces 'Mini' Search Appliance

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  • Affordable ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:01PM (#11349380)
    5 grand is not exactly afforable for most small businesses

    • Re:Affordable ? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hethatishere ( 674234 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:11PM (#11349512)
      It's still a significant drop down from the previous search appliance that sells for over $30,000. I don't think it's significantly out of place for many small businesses. Heck, there are single-user workstations that are about that price. This could easily make it's initial cost back quickly in increased worker efficiency.

    • Re:Affordable ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:20PM (#11349630)
      For the business that requires one of these, $5k is quite affordable. If the business cant afford $5k, Id be quite happy to say they should reevaluate their need for one.

    • Cheap (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Boronx ( 228853 )
      It's no more than you'd pay for filing clerk to work 2 months.
    • Businesses with 200 - 400 people are considered small businesses still. A business with 350 people can afford a $5000 box for search.

    • Re:Affordable ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by lilmouse ( 310335 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:52PM (#11350040)
      This is quite affordable even for a company with 20 employees! $5k? A drop in the bucket, if you're shelling out an average of $80K for programmers annually.

      --LWM
    • Have you ever run a small business? Worked for one?

      $5000 is very, very affordable. Our accountant always says "at home I write checks in the hundreds, at work I write checks in the thousands". Writing a $5000 check is not too uncommon an occurance and this is a small (eight employees) company in a dead-end industry.

      For a one man show? probably not, but think of it this way--how many one man business generate 50,000 documents. Remember, google desktop search will do this for a single computer for free.

  • so (Score:1)

    by unfunk ( 804468 )
    how soon before somebody hacks it and reverse engineers Google's Super Secret(tm) Pagerank algorithm?
    • People have already reverse engineered it. Beating it is the hard part to get a top spot is the hard part.

    • Re:so (Score:5, Informative)

      by def ( 87618 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:07PM (#11349456) Homepage
      Pagerank isn't secret, its patented [uspto.gov].

  • Mini me? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mathiasdm ( 803983 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:02PM (#11349396) Homepage
    Did the top guys at google just put their finger against their mouth and say: "I will call it... Mini Google!"

    Wait, that joke's been done already, about two days ago.

    Never mind!

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by krog ( 25663 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:02PM (#11349404) Homepage
    This puts it well within the reach of Slashdot.

    Never again will we have to use the crappiest search function ever! God be praised!

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )
      Actually, Slashdot's search function is not the worst. There is a forum I frequent whose search page has essentially two fields: search text (titles only, not message bodies) and the username who posted.

      But the username is a drop-down box, and there are thousands upon thousands of users. It takes longer for your browser to download, parse, and render as a blank entry the thousands of entries in that drop-down box than it does to just go from page to page of the forum and use your browser's search featu
      • I know you're not talking about phpBB, but phpBB's search 'engine' really sucks.

        You'd think a fine pieace of software like phpBB would have a decent search.

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Funny)

      by daeg ( 828071 )
      Yes, it must be planned after that pesky HTML update so Slashdot doesn't look like 1995.
    • I see you haven't use the search function on the intranet portal thingy where I work.

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

      by zarr ( 724629 )
      You just posted post number 11.349.404. This thing has a limit of 50.000 documents. Calculating the total price is left as an exersice for the reader. (Hint: NOT CHEAP!)

      Pluss, slashdot has about 800.000 registered users. Are we certain these boxes (meant for small to medium sized companies, remember) will handle the load?

  • 50k docs is too small for pretty much everyone ...
    • yep, the small business webmaster is going to piss off the accountant when he comes in one day and says" We just added our 50001st document...gotta scap the the 5000$ search serever for a 32000$ search server.
      given hyperlinking and the dozens of file types indexed, how precise could their 50000 page limit be? Some pages are absolutely nothing but pointers to other pages, Frames incorportate multiple files/documents at a single URL...its gotta be messy to do the counting.
      • a few points:
        a) Said webmaster dude would have to have a damned good reason to have 50,000 documents. Maybe a mid-ranged webmaster, or a wiki-site of some kind, or maybe forum (hey, like slashdot!).
        b) Wouldn't it just be possible to buy another 5k$ machine once the first one's index is up, then simply join the search results? Or at least, that's what seems logical to me...
        c) I would believe that anyone putting a pointer-page on a search-indexing server would be out of their mind. Simply drop all of th

    • Re:Too small (Score:4, Funny)

      by Walkiry ( 698192 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:21PM (#11349638) Homepage
      > 50k docs is too small for pretty much everyone ...

      Yes, but 640k docs should be enough for everyone...

  • First the letter i, now this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jspoon ( 585173 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:03PM (#11349411)
    In '98, Apple introduced the iMac and we were deluged by thousands of products with an i (or some other arbitrary letter if the company wants to seem like rebels) dropped in front of some catchy word. We may just be coming out of that now, 7 years later. For the next 7 years, should we expect everything to be 'mini?'

  • Ob. Johnny Carson (Score:3, Funny)

    by NardofDoom ( 821951 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:03PM (#11349416)
    /me holds envelope to head
    "Eleventy Billion Dollars"

    /me opens envelope
    "What will Apple's lawyers squeeze out of Google for trademark infringement. [apple.com]

    Ed McMahon: Hah hah hah! You are correct sir!

  • Meh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by NewOrleansNed ( 836441 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:03PM (#11349419)
    Search appliance? That's one freaking expensive flashlight.
  • It now appears that "mini" (Mac mini, iPod mini Cooper mini) is the new "i" (iPod, iLife, iTrip, iHateINames).

    Bravo, pop culture.

  • Slashdot could use one of these... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:05PM (#11349433) Homepage Journal
    Seriously....the current Search functionality on /. sucks big time.

    I noticed a few days back (can't reproduce it) that the Search button was changed to "Google Search". I was disappointed, however, when I realized that it just searched Google for the term with an added "site: slashdot.org".

    Using "site:slashdot.org" with Google doesn't work too well, because for some reason Google seems to "age" older pages in it's index for sites like Slashdot, which are more dynamic, and which it presumably crawls more often (alongwith the other news sites).

    This aging mechanism (or whatever it is) means I can't go to Google and type in "GillBates0 site:slashdot.org" to get *all* of my past 739 comments (like subscribers can), even though they're archived and accessible from Slashdot.

    • I think slashdot's a bit too large at this point to consider such a small device, sadly. Not to be said that Slashdot doesn't need a better searching utility, but that at well over 600,000 users, 5-15% posting at around 200 comments per article per day, you could see just how quickly this index would grow.

      It would be very nice of Google to donate the software needed for such a server to /., and let Slashdot build the hardware, but that would never happen. Or they could just donate the whole box, and si
    • site:slashdot.org could work better if our archives were more easily crawlable.

      If you understand how PageRank works, you'll understand why the boingboing archives [boingboing.net] beat the hell out of Slashdot archives [slashdot.org]. One is two links deep for every story, the other insanely deep for older stories.

      Re-doing that page we would let Google and other search engines do all the heavy lifting, and it would cost a whole lot less than buying a new server.
  • Can't you just use a free google site search? Is it really worth 5k just to get a more customized search page? Or am I missing something (very likely)?
    • Which google can't see.
    • The most obvious problem with site: searches on Google is that they sort of require Google to have access to your documents. Oh, and they don't stop your competitors from doing the same search :).

      This thing is intended for internal use, for your intranet, for more sensitive documents.

    • Re:Just use Site Search? (Score:2, Informative)

      by grub ( 11606 )

      If your intranet has proprietary or secret information you wouldn't want to open it up to google's internet search. Why let your competition search your online info? You wouldn't give them access to your filing cabinets.
    • I think you'd find it very hard to get the free google site search to search your companies Intranet site, seeing as it would be closed off from the net and only accessible inside your company.

  • Oh no....... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DisasterDoctor ( 775095 )
    For the love of God, lets not start naming everything 'mini'. We have just finally broke the 'e'-naming habit.
  • Google's PageRank algorithm does seem to be the best approach to searching the Web. However, this would appear to work well because they can exploit the huge size of the Web - the sheer volume of data makes the system look smart.

    I suspect that in most corporate intranets there won't be enough documents, or enough links, for PageRank to be appreciably different from any other search engine.

    Lets face it - the biggest advantage this has over other tools is the Google brand.

    • Question: Who said the box contained an active implementation of PageRank? I'm sure Google's capable of building several different searching algorithms and then having the OS of the machine or a daemon simply select the most effective search algorithm for the task, cache results, and optimise querys on the fly.. I'm sure PageRank is *one* of the abilities of this server, but it surely isn't the *only* or the *best*.
  • Is spotlight scalable to a webserver type application? then on ecould just buy a good apple offering and not need a google search applicance at all!! wouldnt that be great?
    cheers
    ram
    • Yes, it is applicable for a webserver. There was an AIAT (Formally V-Twin, now SearchKit, soon Spotlight, all the same technology) CGI Script for some webservers on Mac OS 8.
  • Given that every time I talk to anyone else in IT the conversation comes round to "Why is google SO bad now?", I can't see it being worth 32K just to be annoyed by it.
    • It's not that Google's bad -- it's that there's active conflict between Google, trying to give you the best matches, and some people who are trying to either show their webpage at the top of the page listings or tweak pagerank to improve their ad dollars. In other words, it's the conflict between Google and the Google gamers.

      Thankfully, this problem will be almost entirely absent on an intranet site (unless your Marketing people go crazy and decide they want their PDF about "the new standards in PC" to ap
      • unless your Marketing people go crazy and decide they want their PDF about "the new standards in PC" to appear higher on the list than IT's "the new PC standard" document :)

        congratulations, you have invented a new type of consulting activity. you might want to patent that.
  • You have to ask yourself why a large corporation would spend $5,000 for a device that could index probably only a fraction at best of its documents. Google should consider instead offering a Mac version of the software that can run on the Mac Mini and index 100-200K documents for $500/license.
  • Is it just more, or does google never seem to finish anything?
    They announce something, get it in ok working order, and then move on leaving the project in beta.
    It's nice that they keep the new projects rolling, but maybe they should finish gmail, or google suggest, or froogle, or groups, or news!!!
    It seems like the only thing not in beta is their basic and image search functions.
  • And I'd search for one on ebay, but they'll all be bid up to $5200. You can bet a paycheck on that.

  • Integrate with Samba's smbclient? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mralert ( 837483 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:10PM (#11349494) Homepage
    The documents crawled have to be web-accessible (http or https) according to the product description. This suprises me as the vast amount of company documents are probably on Windows file servers.

    Why not hook up with the Samba team to enable crawling on Windows shares? I think Samba-integration would be a killer feature for a product like this.

  • Perfect. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bs_02_06_02 ( 670476 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:11PM (#11349510)
    It's a good idea at a good price, and I think it'll do well.

    I see someone has already complained about the price for small biz. Frankly, I'd challenge you to find someone to set up a search website, buy hardware, and administer it for a year for under $5000. And, provide an interface that's friendly, and search results that are useful?

    To me, $5000 seems kinda cheap. Especially if it works and I don't have to hire some really expensive consultant to run it on a fulltime basis.

    • Bet you could do it with this $2,500 software! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine (see http://northernlight.com/esevs.html [northernlight.com])

      $2,500/year gets you a world-class search engine capable of searching up to 150,000 documents (more, if you go with a different license). Runs on a Linux box. Crawls not only web-crawable content, but ftp-accessible stuff and databases, too. I can and have customized it using perl. I love it.

      Dave Baker
      Using it at http://benefitslink.com/search/ [benefitslink.com]

  • Somewhat OT (Score:4, Funny)

    by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .thguorw.wodahs.> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:15PM (#11349555) Homepage Journal
    Is it just me, or has "mini" taken over as the new "e" in marketing. The Mini Cooper. The iPod Mini. The Apple Mini. Google Mini. Even Disney has jumped on the bandwagon with Mini Mouse! Where will it stop? Duke Nukem Mini?
    • in all fairness, mini is the name of the company for the "mini cooper". the car itself is just a "cooper".

      its like a ford mustang.
      • Uh, no.

        The current rendition of it is the MINI, by BMW.

        The original was made by Austin Morris, which was the merger between Austin and Morris, and part of BMG. Its model name was "Mini". John Cooper later modified it into what was called the "Mini Cooper". The Mini was sold under both the Austin and the Morris badges. There was not a company named "Mini" which produced a "Cooper".
    • ...The Mini Cooper...

      The Mini Cooper's been around since the early sixties, I believe, so it's not really a part of some new marketing trend.
  • I want one.. but only because it would look really, really cool in my server rack.

  • Innovative? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:17PM (#11349580)

    Google is recognized as the global leader in innovative search technology.

    Too bad it still can't handle mailing list archives worth a damn. Search for Linux and Blender, and you'll get an email about Blender with the word "Linux" in one of the "Next by [thread] [author] [date]" links. Useless.

    Too bad they're regularly taken to task by "optimization" companies (have been for years). Thanks- I'll pick Teoma as my "most innovative" search engine.

    I flat-out laughed when Page said this during their ABC News People of the Year interview:

    "We have kind of a mantra of 'don't be evil,' which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone. So, if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing."

    Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?

    • Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?

      You seem to be taking the position that cooperating with something that is evil makes you evil. Consider the alternative, though. If google didn't make a censored version, either people would be given a bubnch of dead links when they clicked on links to things that were censored, or they would not have google news at all.

      If google gives the people all th

      • wakeup call (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:33PM (#11350604)
        If google didn't make a censored version, either people would be given a bubnch of dead links when they clicked on links to things that were censored,

        Maybe then they'd start asking questions. Instead, they're given a nice whitewash where nothing is out of place.

  • The MSN toolbar allows you to cache/search networked drives.

    This essentially provides all the services the google appliance provides.

    $5000 or Free? Which will your CFO want you to use?
    • That's an apple to orange comparision. The MSN Toolbar and other toolbars are software solutions for personal use and not well suited for corporate use.

      The Google Mini and the Search Appliance search your corporate extranet and public websites for relevant information so that the whole company has access to the information.

      For example, if your company has a huge repository of corporate documents, then you can search the documents using a toolbar IF you have file permissions to the server, directory, an

      • If your company uses a search appliance like Google's then searches are saved and indexed as if the user was searching the web. Also the users do not need to have direct access to the files.


        Ah, but users do need direct access to the files - the files have be "web-enabled" so that Google can search them.

        That's a good point, tho - being able to make a quick search via Google would be much more useful.

        --LWM

  • Is Google moving out of their strength? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sialagogue ( 246874 ) <sialagogueNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:26PM (#11349694)

    I've been testing Google Desktop Search for a while now, and I'm wondering whether Google's need to expand (like so many companies before them) could be the beginning of a slippery slide downward. The cynical answer in general terms is certainly yes, but I'm thinking of one specific point here...

    I'll guess that most people fell in love with Google the search engine, and then Google the brand, for its Internet search performance - its results felt more intuitive, more in line with what I was really looking for, like it knew my intent.

    Those search results were based in its then new and unique Pagerank algorithm -- ranking pages based on the weight of other pages linking to them, essentially finding an efficient way of turning the inter-connectedness of web pages into a defacto recommendation system.

    But my experience with Desktop Search has be much different. Since no one is reading and then linking to files on my hard drive (although I run Windows XP, so who knows...) there is no oppotunity for a PageRank-type algorithm to do its work, and my feeling is that Desktop Search search results really suffer for it.

    It's like the worst of both worlds, without PageRank it's just a Google-branded keyword search, and worse, a keyword search tool that doesn't really have a sophisticated query language in order to construct more complex searches.

    My concern is that Google-the-functionality is getting slowly replaced with Google-the-brand, and that Google will simply become synonymous with "search" rather than "eerily great search."

    I'd be interested in other's people's experiences with their off-Internet search tools. I'm sure they are efficient and such, but do you get that same "I know what you're thinking" vibe as you do from Google Internet search?

    • My experience has been very disappointing with the google desktop search. I saved some files for a computer network class. I search for "computer network doc" and it found some word docs but not a computer network document. The standard search functionality of windows xp is better than this.

      It turns out that once I did find them, two of the documents were called "computer_networks1.doc" and "computer_networks_may.doc". Now how much more obvious could that be? I wonder why google didn't find them?

      Its
    • How can PageRank be of ANY use in a desktop search? Hmmm let's see, let's rank files higher that others have been reading from Joe's computer. Yeah ok.

      There's a lot more to search than just PageRank, and it would be quite foolish to try and apply that to every type of search, as evident in this instance.

      What I'm thinking is a different form. The more recent a file has been accessed, the higher up it's placed.

      Also, Google search can be smart in trying to figure out what it is you're trying to search fo
    • Those search results were based in its then new and unique Pagerank algorithm -- ranking pages based on the weight of other pages linking to them, essentially finding an efficient way of turning the inter-connectedness of web pages into a defacto recommendation system.

      But my experience with Desktop Search has be much different. Since no one is reading and then linking to files on my hard drive (although I run Windows XP, so who knows...) there is no oppotunity for a PageRank-type algorithm to do its work,

  • We have a GB-1001 (Score:3, Informative)

    by homeslice3 ( 208776 ) <blonardo@gmail.com> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:42PM (#11349895) Homepage
    We use it on our Intranet at a small goverment agency and it's made a huge difference for us - so I'm a big fan. It's easy to manage too.

    I'm not sure however, what niche this product is filling - the box we have allows us to have unlimited subcollections so all of our smaller units can setup their own searches very easily - we just pass which collection we want to hit, and then get some xml back from the box.

    So all of our little sub-offices and depts won't ever need their own box.

  • wtf? (Score:3, Funny)

    by toocoolforschool ( 848274 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:46PM (#11349951)
    why would i want a search engine in my cooper?
  • i don't know about anyone else, but i don't accept any news about mini products on slashdot until they hit the front page again in a few days. wake me up on sunday.
  • I am looking at one for a ASP that i am developing, i wanted the larger one, but i can't drop that much cash.

    something like this will allow you to scale a bit as your needs grow up into the larger one.

    good move by google.
  • PageRank's power is in it being able to judge the popularity of a site based on the number of links to it. For individual installations, it seems like the inter-linking of pages would be less organic and therefore less useful for judging the best results.

    Also, since it's on an internal network it would probably be just as (if not more) effective to apply PageRank based on the number of hits a page actually receives instead of the number of "votes" it gets.
  • In other news, BMW sues both Google and Apple for trademark infringement.

    Chip H.
  • Shouldn't the price for the mini be 4096? Or 5120?
  • I'm still waiting for a similar product that gives businesses their own "Internal GMail" server. My employer uses Lotus Notes for e-mail, and forbids us from using POP to access our accounts. Lotus notes is horrendous, and a real pain to access using Linux. GMail is much more useful, and would be an awesome replacement.
  • Just what I need... another appliance to clutter up my kitchen counter.

    --Rob

  • They should make one for home use, and call it the Google Personal Pornography Search Device.

    ... I'd buy one.

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