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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 ;)

38 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Oh now come on by yobbo · · Score: 5, Funny

    People don't have THAT much pr0n do they?! :)

  2. 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 leviramsey · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Google's "sponsored links" seem like a valid business model to me. Search on something generic like computers [google.com] and you'll see pastel links pop up with advertisements. I imagine people pay a nice chunk of change for those.

      Google runs on two business models: the Sponsored Links model (and the Google Sponsored Links are much more effective than any other online advertising out there) and the sale of search services (to Yahoo!, Washington Post, et al).

      Fact is, Google's already profitable. Why? Because they didn't make the moronic mistakes that the other dot-coms did. Have you seen a Google Super Bowl ad? Have you seen a Google ad anywhere? Exactly. The Google model is, quite simply, you run a lean and mean ship that gets the job done well, and you make money.

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Possibly very good... by jesser · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When's the last time _you_ clicked on a google sponsor because of their compelling attraction?

      Google's ads tend to be relevant to what I'm searching for, so I click on them often.

      Last summer I looked up filk music after seeing something about a "space-themed filk concert featuring Kathy Mar and..." at Stanford the day before the Mars Society convention. I searched for filk, and there was an ad to download some of Kathy Mar's music from mp3.com! I listened to what mp3.com had and then went to the concert. During the concert, I met Kathy and also met the guy who put the ad up.

      Oh, did you mean "What was the last time I bought something through Google adwords"? I haven't yet, but I am now a filk fan and plan to buy Prometeus Music's Space CD when it comes out. (Kathy's CD, which I didn't buy, is also a Prometheus CD.)

      I also ran $50 worth of ads for my non-revenue-generating bookmarklets site because I thought it would be a cool way to give Google money. I don't know how many people run ads without the intent of making money, though.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
  3. Google enters this market at the right time by hawaiianshirt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Google enters this market at the right time by jeffehobbs · · Score: 3, Informative

      Google searches .doc files.

      http://www.google.com/help/faq_filetypes.html

      1. What file types are returned in a Google search? There are 12 main file types searched by Google in addition to standard web formatted documents in HTML. The most common formats are PDF, PostScript, Microsoft Office formats:

      Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)

      Adobe PostScript (ps)

      Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)

      Lotus WordPro (lwp)

      MacWrite (mw)

      Microsoft Excel (xls)

      Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)

      Microsoft Word (doc)

      Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)

      Microsoft Write (wri)

      Rich Text Format (rtf)

      Text (ans, txt) ~jeff

  4. hmm. by raindog151 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  5. 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.

    --
    Sig is taking a break!
  6. 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?

    --

    Edward Burr
    Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
    1. Re:Looking for a good internal search engine by pere · · Score: 3, Informative

      Try http://www.mnogosearch.org

      Brilliant search engine. It has parser for most file-formats (You can use pdf2txt to index your pdf-files). It even indexes your mp3's if you should happen to have some on your local net.

      Free (at least as in beer) for Unix. Binaries for Windows costs between $99 and $699.

    2. Re:Looking for a good internal search engine by richieb · · Score: 5, Informative
      Try htDig. It does all these things and is free software. I used it on a corporate intranet in the past. Not as good as Google, but you can't argue with the price.

      --
      ...richie - It is a good day to code.
  7. Why Google Can Be So Expensive... by BTWR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:Why Google Can Be So Expensive... by PoiBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, I've seen interviews in some business magazines with their CEO. In fact, they are slightly profitable and have been for a few years.

      --
      Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
  8. $20K Isn't really that much if you consider it. by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. 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.

  9. article from C|Net here: by mESSDan · · Score: 4, Informative
    From C|Net.

    It's a little more indepth than the India times article.

    --

    -- Dan
  10. Ouch. Try HTDIG. by Kozz · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  11. We're using it here...it rocks! by HRH+King+Lerxst · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  12. Hey, maybe slashdot can get this... by powerlinekid · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  13. The GPL (and Go Google!) by base3 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Google's product selling for $20,000, and being based on Linux, is a good counterweight to the FUD being spread by Microsoft et al that cries "If we write a product that so much as uses one GPL library, we have to GPL it. Waaaaa."

    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.
  14. 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 :)

  15. 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!

  16. 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
    1. Re:Didn't we know this all along? by travisd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      $20k is jsut the tip of the iceberg - there's also a good revenue stream to be had in those yearly support contracts for the software.

    2. Re:Didn't we know this all along? by neonstz · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you read the entire article you would know that there are two versions for sale, one small $20k box which can index up to 150,000 documents, and one "millions of millions" version which costs $250k.

      If a large company puts out all the revisions of all their documents it will be quite a lot of documents :). $250k is still quite cheap for something that will index all electronic documents the company has ever produced.

  17. 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.

    --
    Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
  18. 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"


    :-)

  19. 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 ostiguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      Philosophically, however, I'd imagine that parsing/indexing patents are far more legitimate in many people's eyes, than say, one click purchasing patents.

      ostiguy

    2. Re:Why does google get a slashdot-patent-pass? by ethereal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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. It wasn't just another "do what we did before, but with a computer this time" patent.

      I'll admit that it helps that their site is non-painful to use, but that's just gravy. Google's search is so much better that even if their site was a pain, it would still be a worthwhile search tool.

      --

      Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and

    3. 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.

    4. 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?

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
  20. Re:Search engine by gorilla · · Score: 3, Informative
    What a horrible script.

    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.

  21. Can too by Moderation+abuser · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  22. 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?

  23. 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.

  24. Re:Ouch. Try HTDIG. by ghutchis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, saying it doesn't have all the fancy matching algorithms isn't really fair.

    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_fact or

    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