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Google's Search Appliance
An anonymous reader noted that Google is working on a Search Engine
that you can install behind your corporate firewall for indexing
your internal documents. It's a bit thin on information, but it
looks like for as little (cough) as $20k, you can have your own
google box. Not for everyone obviously ;)
Aside from anything else, it gives Google a revenue stream so they can continue to provide their services (web, image and usenet searches) for free; they need to find a valid business model, and hopefully this can contribute.
I see more of this in the future - if you want a search engine, buy one and put it on the network. If you want a web server, buy one and put it on the network. You want a disk server... Well you get the point.
As hardware continues to get cheaper and software more expensive as it gets more complex it makes sense to do this rather than trying to configure multiple applications all on the same server.
And good luck to google making money on this so they can keep their search engine fast and free of annoying advertisments.
Sig is taking a break!
I would like to find a search engine that will index:
- text files
- html files
- PDF files
- names of binary files
Unfortunately, I am not able to spend much to purchase such a search engine (say $20, not $20K). This would be for my personal use, not for any kind of commercial use, and would not be funded except by my anemic hobby budget.Does anybody have any recommendations?
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Our corporate intranet has an excite search on it, and the intranet is not accessible from the net. I doubt they would have paid $20k for it either. Does anyone else have something like this, because I was under the impression it was common to have an internal search engine?
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Surprisingly few corporations are willing to spend money indexing their internal document set, as other search engine companies discovered.
Excite, Altavista, HotBot, Lycos all at one time or another tried to sell to the corporate market with little success. So either things have changed since, or Google management repeating an old mistake from other companies...
Moreover, companies such as Verity which specialize in corporate search engines have reported falling revenues as of late...
... the ht://dig search engine.
In this climate of IT layoffs, I reckon it would prove cheaper and better to hire a programmer to take the GPL'ed ht://dig code and hack in some Google-like improvements.
The major improvement needed is the ability to search on phrases, and to do boolean searches.
Such a beefed up search/indexing system would not be subject to licensing fees, and would be freely redistributable (say, to other company offices).
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
If you consider the amount of time needed to create a search engine like Google, you'll see that $20k is very cheap. At my company, IT charges our dept $100/hr, so $20k only gives you 200 man-hours. And, that's cheap! In talking with some of my friends, their IT dept charges almost $500/hr, which would only give you 40 man-hours. I'd much rather pay Google for their search engine than get a product from IT that they threw together in 40-200 man hours.
Part of the success of the google technology is based on the page rank system which depends on many people linking to pages and so "ranking" them. On a corporate site you don't have as many separate opinions (i.e. pages managed independently) so perhaps the page rank part of google won't be as successful. OTOH just having fast search of all the docs would be good here :)
development.lombardi.com
This has a LOT more business application that appears on the surface. And $20K for such a solution is comparable to paying $50 for Red Hat to run a server.
Back in my systems integration days, we had very many law firm clients who used document management to organize the truly prodigious quantity of information they had to deal with. Spending $50K on the solution was not unheard of even among small firms. In fact, they usually wound up spending $20K just on third party maintenance utilities to support their document management systems!
Isn't this just confirming what we already knew?
On top of that, depending on the size of your intranet and how efficient/inefficient indexing already has been, $20K may be a bargain.
Of course, how many companies are really going to have a use for it? For giggles, lets say the entire Fortune 500. That's 500 * 20K = 10,000 K = 10 Million Dollars US. In the grand scheme of things, that's a lot of money, but not a LOT of money. Perhaps they'll add on pay-per-use functions for even ritzier search features?
Sigs? We don't need no goddamn sigs!
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Years ago Infoseek offered a version of their search engine to Index LARGE collections of documents. We had over 500,000 IT was around 15k if I remeber correctly. Python on a Sparc 20, (20k itself at the time with mem proccesors array and tapes) So we had alomst 4k tied up in the whole thing, There was if I remeber correctly a per site, or per page fee in addition over so many documents, I made an error in a config file once and allowed it to traverse links, other than filling the hard drive, quickly, the additional costing we did after to see how much it would be should we decide to keep those docs was hilarious.
:) Indexing LARGE repositories isnt easy and config can be a pain. 20k sounds ok to me. I have YET to see anopen source solution that can handle VERY large document sets ASPSeek, but it still has issues, and over about 2.5 million docs I hear its a dead horse.
20k, Isnt bad at all if your talking some serious indexing. We indexed 5, F500 compaines techincal documents at the time, before they were all in house, this was 97-98. It was slick, I often wondered what happened to that software package.
Anyone know what google is written in ? I decompiled a fair bit of Infoseeks just to see what was what, and because I could
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I'm suprised it's taken Google so long to get in on the act, after all Northen Lights got into this just recently as well (Can't be bothered to search for the old /. link to the story right now though).
/. too ;-) The company was a massive multinational ex-British state owned utility and wanted to be able, amongst other things, have every single company document on the network and have a database of all staff and their skillset so that as relevent business units were formed managers could place staff already on the books rather than get contractors in. The system sold for several hundered thousands pounds, so there's plenty of money in it even if it's only the big companies who are going to really need this kind of thing.
Three years ago I was involved in impelementing a similar box, from Excalibur Technologies, for the company I was working for during my university gap year (it was there that I first start reading
Judging from the website Google clearly have some fantastic technology, and they certainly have the reputation, they should do very well.
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
Wouldn't it be great for when they say "your code doesn't meet the specification of what the product needs to do" and you can use it to say "let's look to the wayback machine to see when you changed the spec but didn't bother telling me"
:-)
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
slashdot talked about this in 1999 when the patent came up. Its 2+ years later now. google has mostly crushed the competing search engines because the results of their algorithm are preferred to other algorithms. Their revenue sources are not public, but I believe I read recently that half of their revenue is from advertisements and half from technology licensing.
So, the point for discussion...
The world's favorite search engine exists because of its software patent. This patent has caused great harm to the competing search engines. Is this ok because...
Google is great search engine for the Intenet, because it ranks pages according to how many other pages link to it. Its very democratic. I don't see how Google behind the firewall would be a viable product, what will it rate document on how many other company documents link to it?
There a number of other existing indexing engines that are signigiantly cheaper and more mature. Google should stick to what it does best. I guess this shows they aren't very profitable and are looking for other sources of revenue.
Right now Google tends to be among the bigger darlings of Slashdot, but will they remain that way if they release this product and it's not Open Source? 'Cause they're nuts if they're planning on charging $20K for it but making it Open Source. Are they traitors to the cause, or is it just another understandable case of "Money talks, bullshit walks" when it comes to Open Source and the Real World?
So what, Google isn't a 100% libre-kosher company? Name any of their competitor that is. It's called "lesser of two evils".
As far as I know, Google has never filed for frivolous "IP" lawsuits, they respect web standards, they provide gratis, decent service, they don't fuck with your browser, and they tell you who paid for word placement as opposed to just putting paying advertisers on top without mention. They also happen to use free software and give it good press.
htdig has made me a hero here. Mostly because of its reliability and price.
It astonishes me how people can sell something that's already free. Canned air will be next.
- Freddy