Slashdot Mirror
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 ;)
People don't have THAT much pr0n do they?! :)
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.
Everywhere you look, companies are hawking products geared for searching internal documents. Google is making a good move; enter an expanding market as an established leader in searching.
hawaiianshirt
will it also index employee email?
Searched the intranet for 'herbal viagra'.
Results 1-10 of about 1,279,500. Search took 0.14 seconds.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
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.
Google did exactly what us fanboys all whined and complained for - a company that made a good product (awesome search engine) without selling out (no popup ads). Google offered a free service, built up an enoumous following, and now offers its premium service for a premium price, while insuring its loyal customers continued free services. Forget eBay, Google is an Internet-Success-Story worthy of such praise!
The companies that are useing the apliance are Large Corporation with Hundreds perhaps Thousands of computers and Millions of files and documents to find. The real question is how much money is the company loosing from people who have to redo misplaced documents. or make new ones which are simular to an other document that someone else made a while back. In a large corportation a Thousand of people working at $20 an hour are taking 1 hour to redo a document or spend time finding it. It makes up for the caust. Also if it gives google more money the better change the search eng. Stays free and without a ton of anoying avertising.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Go to Google, search for "google advertising", and you'll get this page near the top of the search results. Basically, they're selling people "sponsored links".
Little lines of text from advertisers. Sweet, huh?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Google sometimes has ads in a sidebar on the right or top. These are targeted based on your search, and are thus usually relevent enough not to be annoying (not to mention being ignorable).
I find it hard to believe the revenue from those is really significant, but who knows; I bet their clickthrough rates are much better than those damn popup ads.
Actually, this is like a 10-line script if you can use `grep`... something like...
#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
$query=param( 'q' );
$document_root = "/home/";
print "<html><body>";
foreach `grep $query $document_root`
{
print "<li>$_</li>\n";
}
print "</body></html>";
exit(0);
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
It's a little more indepth than the India times article.
-- Dan
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!"
Yes, quite CLEARLY it's only for those who've got some cash to blow. If you've got a modest-sized Intranet site, I would highly recommend htDig. I've installed and configured it in several places and it works like a charm. Best of all, it's GPLed! Sure, it doesn't have all the fancy matching algorithms used by Google, but it does a damned good job nonetheless.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I could see one of the advantages that this would have is the ability to index pages/emails/whatever very quickly. No need for the wait that accompanies a index request on a web search engine because the spider will be around every hour or less in an intranet.
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...
They just implemented this were I work, it's a vast improvement over what we had before. It even includes the cache and newsgroup features!!
Two thumbs up!!
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
... 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...
At least then the search feature would work right and they can finally cache all those sites that we take down.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Unless Google reimplemented their own operating system, or <shudder> ported it to Win2K, they have a very expensive product, that runs on Linux, that is not GPL.
More power to Google--I'm glad to see them finding a way to make money without trashing their search engine, like happened with the previously good search engines that came before (e.g. Altavista, Lycos).
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Note the date, gentlemen. If Google is selling wholesale software solutions, the countdown clock to paid searches begins today. I'm betting that in less than a year's time we'll be asked to pay for Google searches. Hopefully by that time someone will have figured out a good system for micropayments.
Free is wonderful, but free doesn't scale when it comes to indexing the majority of the internet.
------
Today's Top Deals
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
It's not that expensive, considering the amount of money a corp wastes every year. If you put it in perspective - it is half of an average worker's yearly salary - and if management thinks it will save that much money over a year. . . :)
Companies have private jets so the pres / vp can get wasted while traveling across the country - $20k is nothing.
Google roxxor!
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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........
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
I know I'm biased (and ignorant), but Google is probably the best general-purpose search engine out there, with truly innovative quality filtering like PageRank(tm) and other very neat tricks. They have been around long enough that even the weakest of minds know Google. If this new retail product is as efficient and clean as their websearch, and well supported, they're going to make a killing! I really hope they find huge success, they've earned it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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...
to make them profitable. Google does so many things so well, and provides it all free to the world. It's not asking too much, I think, for them to ask companies to foot the bill for something like this if that's what it takes for them to continue to stay in business and keep doing all this neat wonderful free stuff.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
Well you see, Google has half a brain.
"Hmm...if somebody's searching for domain registration, let's offer text ads about domain registration. Then, they won't be pissed about downloaing goofy banner/javascripts and they may actually click on the ad because it *is* useful."
Almost makes sense--but then you can't shoot the monkey.
Seriously though, I've clicked on Googe ads numeorous times beause they're relevant.
We've already spent way to much just for the software from someone else. Still have yet to launch it though. Google should have done this long ago as soon as they realized their software works. Well, ok, that's an oversimplification, but still, the worked on these corporate search programs before, and they just weren't up to par.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
No taint checking (What happens if 'q' contains ";rm -rf /;".
No warnings.
No proper formatting of HTML, on the output. If the grep matches "", then it's not going to display anything on netscape. You need to either strip tags, or force tag matches.
Not kidding. I work for a very large multinational and the corporate search engine is an excercise in frustration. It's purpose in life seems to be to return bizarre and obscure documents as the results of it's searches.
$20k is nothing to shell out[1] for the capabilities that Google has.
[1] In corporate terms.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Finding that vital piece of information can be far more important than $20k, especially to a large organisation.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The first item in your search results. Google matches up what you are searching for with a company offering a compatible service/product.
This kind of directed advertising is valuable and a good application of their service.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
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.
If anyone thinks $20k is expensive for 150k documents, they haven't bought a search engine recently!
Check out prices for Inktomi . Of course the more documents you have, the lower the per-document cost, but still they charge $7500 for 10k documents.
The "average" price of a Verity K2 license is $200k. (check this itworld.com link.
Good content indexing is expensive. Google will be undercutting the competition with this release. $20k really is a bargain.
Google's claim to fame is its ability to rank results properly (something no other search engine ever got right). The rank, if I recall correctly, is _mostly_ based on links from other sites.
Now, when you're indexing thousands of doc and pdf files on a company network, how many of those link to each other?
And how many companies have internal newsgroups that can be searched? (No, Exchange shared folders don't count - or can Google index those as well?)
Like duh!
*cough*
(Please think about it before you roast me.)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
for $40000, you can get a sun e220, and run altavista's search engine on it. even then, if you want to integrate it, you still need to do 30-40 hours of work to make it all work right.
having something for $20000 or so is a godsend, especially if it comes with its own hardware (even though its hardware is probably not as nice as an e220)... throw in that they'll probably do the work when it breaks, and this is a no-brainer for anyone needing to index even as few as 25000 pages.
Mod this up! Indeed, this is a HORRIBLE script, stupid idea, lame lame lame.
This would be a great way to introduce a really NASTY security hole into your site by using this script.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
No more 25-man midnight raids that cart off your entire data center. Now the FBI or BSA can just pick up your search applicance.
You actually got results returned from your search server?
Lucky bastard. Our corporate Intranet search engine usually would just return 'Query Timed out'. Eventually they just took the search boxes off all the web pages.
I've since built a simple Harvest index for the Intranet.
It can be very interesting finding all of the 'cobweb' documents on intranet sites. Ancient documents relating to projects and managers long since vanished among other stuff that management would prefer to see forgotten...
There are some cool features that are unique to Google, but I'm not sure if 'Convert PDF to HTML' and 'highlight search terms' are worth $20K.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Aside from the GNU license and association with SourceForge, I'm not sure what advantages ht://Dig has over the other free/commercial indexing products. Perhaps somebody has a comparison page?
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Actually, it's perfect for searches about that size, and bigger even. When you talk about fast find (at least the later versions), you're actually talking about the Windows Index Server in drag. Index Server is a fairly robust piece of work that allows sites to implement (as a part of Commerce Server, SQL Server, and others) full text searches across the media. It's componentized nature makes it convenient to use from VB/VBS/ASP/other COM capable languages. Not too bad actually...
The joke was about Fast Find though which, IMO, is the most crufty unfriendly piece of sh*t ever incorporated into MS Office. In Office 95, 97, and 2000 (haven't tried Office XP yet) it's something I systematically eradicate on every machine I see. It's known for firing up it's re-indexing while the user is already using the machine, and it's also known for not being controllable by the user (i.e. the user can't tell it when to re-index).
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Actually, saying it doesn't have all the fancy matching algorithms isn't really fair.
t or
Granted, we can't implement Google's patented things, but that's not to say we don't come close.
Indexing the text of links to documents? Yes.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#description_fac
Keeping track of the weight of links pointing to a document? Yes.
http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#backlink_factor
Probably the big "missing link" is a proximity weighting. Interested? Help is always welcome!
-Geoff
In the field of software, the USPTO has a track record of granting patents on the obvious. The explantion I've heard is that evaluating the applications is hard so they grant them and let the courts and companies sort it out.
There is also the issue of patenting mathematics. That is not allowed. Many software patents are really patents on a machine wink wink that happens to produce the same results as a mathematical formula.
And I can't tell if you woke up in a socialist country or not. I woke up in one that is nominally capitalistic, but more socialist for the lowest castes.
If you have been to europe you know that mercedes DOES sell cheap cars. They are like euorpean Fords. You see Mercedes busses, tractors, compacts, everything. They are so common that thats what people think of when they see the symbol, and they can't sell as many sports cars or SUV's. So they export all the high end cars here, where we buy them.
Point is, I agree that this is a smart Google move. You separate the market, and give people in both places the things that they want. That's why you are never going to see an ad banner on google trying to get the average surfer to buy their $20 engine
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
I noticed this last week when searching Cisco's site. The addition of the "powered by Google" snippet in the upper right hand corner of the search results threw me for a loop.
I haven't noticed much of an improvement in their search results yet - perhaps it takes time to build the link relationships index?
Cheers,
J.J.
Hmm. If Apple does use Google, why do they and Google get different results?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck