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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 ;)

4 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. 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!

    --
    sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
  3. 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.