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Google's Search Appliance

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-kinda-clever dept.

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 ;)

15 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Possibly very good... by larien · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Certainly I'd see value as a user of a huge corporate internet. Several times I've wanted to find information on some of our internal pages which, of course, I can't use google.com for because of the firewall. While there is an internal search engine, it's results can be less than stellar and I've missed Google.

    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.

    1. Re:Possibly very good... by jedrek · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well... we had a 6% click-thru rate on our test run of 10.000 which cost us a whoping $110. I don't think that's too bad.

  2. Splendid! by johnburton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  3. Looking for a good internal search engine by egburr · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I've been looking (when not otherwise distracted) for a good search engine for my documents on my home network, on a linux server. So far, I haven't found anything I've liked (or that even seemed to work very well).

    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?

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    Edward Burr
    Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
  4. Re:$20K Isn't really that much if you consider it. by Styros · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. How will page rank work on a corp site? by ajm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 :)

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    development.lombardi.com
  6. Document management by stinky+wizzleteats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  7. Didn't we know this all along? by SplendidIsolatn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Sorry if this sounds uninformed, but I had always been under the impression that Google's Business Plan was based on the idea of a free public search engine and a commercial private one for companies, which would also offer more and better features.


    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!

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  8. Like infoseek.... by CDWert · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    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 :) 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.

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    Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
  9. Rather have a WayBack machine! by Bluedove · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Rather than a google engine to index everything there, i'd rather have a WayBack Machine that allows me to see the variant versions of documents. (that aren't in a revision control system accessible to me)


    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"


    :-)

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    Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
  10. Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass? by victim · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Just curious about people's opinions here. Google gets covered fairly regularly on slashdot. Usually when a company that uses software patents to protect its business from competition comes up on slashdot they get reamed along with the USPTO.

    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...
    • the software patent system is just fine
    • many software patents are silly, but this one is worthwhile.
    • it is a silly patent, but google is good enough that we forget about that.
    • no one cares how google got where they are. It is just good that they work well.
    • it is not ok.
    1. Re:Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass? by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Because they don't do evil or annoying things. That isn't a tremendous excuse, but it just works in practice. No intrusive ads, performance is always great for a free service, etc.

      Tremendous excuse? I'd say its a future model for all businesses.

      Forget the tedious absolutism of the neosocialists -- that model will never be implemented anywhere (except at the barrel of a gun), and anyone who won't be happy until they get there will never be satisified. However, a company that does a good job at what they do and produces something that they can either give away or appear to give away something without doing the annoying, evil greedy things that other companies do should be the benchmark.

      For example, Mercedes Benz -- what if they still sold their really expensive cars to rich guys who would pay for them BUT they would also sell a car that went 200,000 miles without major service for $10k?

      I think the list goes on -- subsidize basic, honest products and services with expensive stuff that others are willing and able to pay for. It makes you a saint. I don't see why so many other businesses hold onto the "rape everyone" philosophy.

    2. Re:Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass? by jesser · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I agree with the "many are silly, but this one is worthwhile". Google's approach was non-obvious, innovative, and really advanced the state of the art.

      Since the "state of the art" advances more quickly in CS than it does in most areas, should we expect Google to place its original patent in the public domain after several years? Or do you think that in several years, someone will invent a completely different algorithm that yields better search results, rendering Google's patent obsolete?

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  11. Open source, right? by Zico · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  12. Nobody's perfect by Nicolas+MONNET · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.