Slashdot Mirror
Google Announces 'Mini' Search Appliance
demetrio writes "In an effort to cater to small business search needs, Google has announced a new search appliance dubbed the 'Mini'. Priced at $5,000, well below the starting price of $32,000 for its other appliances, the 'Mini' should help smaller businesses leverage Google's search expertise at an affordable price."
Actually, Slashdot's search function is not the worst. There is a forum I frequent whose search page has essentially two fields: search text (titles only, not message bodies) and the username who posted.
But the username is a drop-down box, and there are thousands upon thousands of users. It takes longer for your browser to download, parse, and render as a blank entry the thousands of entries in that drop-down box than it does to just go from page to page of the forum and use your browser's search feature to find the title of the thread you want, since that's all you can search for with the forum's function anyhow.
Why not hook up with the Samba team to enable crawling on Windows shares? I think Samba-integration would be a killer feature for a product like this.
http://www.mralert.com/ - Free web site monitoring
Question: Who said the box contained an active implementation of PageRank? I'm sure Google's capable of building several different searching algorithms and then having the OS of the machine or a daemon simply select the most effective search algorithm for the task, cache results, and optimise querys on the fly.. I'm sure PageRank is *one* of the abilities of this server, but it surely isn't the *only* or the *best*.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
My experience has been very disappointing with the google desktop search. I saved some files for a computer network class. I search for "computer network doc" and it found some word docs but not a computer network document. The standard search functionality of windows xp is better than this.
It turns out that once I did find them, two of the documents were called "computer_networks1.doc" and "computer_networks_may.doc". Now how much more obvious could that be? I wonder why google didn't find them?
Its funny too because I tell this to people and they think Im lying because google is just infaluble or something....
And lately even web results seem to be less accurate. Is this just me? I really hope to see some real innovation in the basic search soon.
BTW, bring back the old google groups!
Pluss, slashdot has about 800.000 registered users. Are we certain these boxes (meant for small to medium sized companies, remember) will handle the load?
$2,500/year gets you a world-class search engine capable of searching up to 150,000 documents (more, if you go with a different license). Runs on a Linux box. Crawls not only web-crawable content, but ftp-accessible stuff and databases, too. I can and have customized it using perl. I love it.
Dave Baker
Using it at http://benefitslink.com/search/