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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 ;)

7 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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    Sig is taking a break!
  3. 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!

  4. 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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    sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
  5. 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.