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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."
5 grand is not exactly afforable for most small businesses
Did the top guys at google just put their finger against their mouth and say: "I will call it... Mini Google!"
Wait, that joke's been done already, about two days ago.
Never mind!
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
This puts it well within the reach of Slashdot.
Never again will we have to use the crappiest search function ever! God be praised!
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
In '98, Apple introduced the iMac and we were deluged by thousands of products with an i (or some other arbitrary letter if the company wants to seem like rebels) dropped in front of some catchy word. We may just be coming out of that now, 7 years later. For the next 7 years, should we expect everything to be 'mini?'
"Eleventy Billion Dollars"
/me opens envelope
"What will Apple's lawyers squeeze out of Google for trademark infringement.
Ed McMahon: Hah hah hah! You are correct sir!
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Search appliance? That's one freaking expensive flashlight.
We will just have to wait and see. If it comes in a sleek package that's 6 1/2 inches by 2 inches then we will know.
Evolution or ID?
I noticed a few days back (can't reproduce it) that the Search button was changed to "Google Search". I was disappointed, however, when I realized that it just searched Google for the term with an added "site: slashdot.org".
Using "site:slashdot.org" with Google doesn't work too well, because for some reason Google seems to "age" older pages in it's index for sites like Slashdot, which are more dynamic, and which it presumably crawls more often (alongwith the other news sites).
This aging mechanism (or whatever it is) means I can't go to Google and type in "GillBates0 site:slashdot.org" to get *all* of my past 739 comments (like subscribers can), even though they're archived and accessible from Slashdot.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
For the love of God, lets not start naming everything 'mini'. We have just finally broke the 'e'-naming habit.
Pagerank isn't secret, its patented.
WRCT Pittsburgh, 88.3FM
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
It's a good idea at a good price, and I think it'll do well.
I see someone has already complained about the price for small biz. Frankly, I'd challenge you to find someone to set up a search website, buy hardware, and administer it for a year for under $5000. And, provide an interface that's friendly, and search results that are useful?
To me, $5000 seems kinda cheap. Especially if it works and I don't have to hire some really expensive consultant to run it on a fulltime basis.
-- No sig for you!
Is it just me, or has "mini" taken over as the new "e" in marketing. The Mini Cooper. The iPod Mini. The Apple Mini. Google Mini. Even Disney has jumped on the bandwagon with Mini Mouse! Where will it stop? Duke Nukem Mini?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Google is recognized as the global leader in innovative search technology.
Too bad it still can't handle mailing list archives worth a damn. Search for Linux and Blender, and you'll get an email about Blender with the word "Linux" in one of the "Next by [thread] [author] [date]" links. Useless.
Too bad they're regularly taken to task by "optimization" companies (have been for years). Thanks- I'll pick Teoma as my "most innovative" search engine.
I flat-out laughed when Page said this during their ABC News People of the Year interview:
"We have kind of a mantra of 'don't be evil,' which is to do the best things that we know how for our users, for our customers and for everyone. So, if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing."
Hmm, Mr. Page- is bowing to (oops, I mean, fully cooperating with) Chinese censorship, in the names of market share, "evil"? Is it "best for everyone"?
Please help metamoderate.
If you read the /. Blurb, or the article, or the homepage for the product, you'll see its not targeted at large corperations, this is for small/medium buisness owners.
For large corperations, you can purchase the The Google Search Appliance , which can index 15 million documents
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If your intranet has proprietary or secret information you wouldn't want to open it up to google's internet search. Why let your competition search your online info? You wouldn't give them access to your filing cabinets.
Trolling is a art,
> 50k docs is too small for pretty much everyone ...
Yes, but 640k docs should be enough for everyone...
---- Take the Space Quiz!
It's no more than you'd pay for filing clerk to work 2 months.
Play Command HQ online
I've been testing Google Desktop Search for a while now, and I'm wondering whether Google's need to expand (like so many companies before them) could be the beginning of a slippery slide downward. The cynical answer in general terms is certainly yes, but I'm thinking of one specific point here...
I'll guess that most people fell in love with Google the search engine, and then Google the brand, for its Internet search performance - its results felt more intuitive, more in line with what I was really looking for, like it knew my intent.
Those search results were based in its then new and unique Pagerank algorithm -- ranking pages based on the weight of other pages linking to them, essentially finding an efficient way of turning the inter-connectedness of web pages into a defacto recommendation system.
But my experience with Desktop Search has be much different. Since no one is reading and then linking to files on my hard drive (although I run Windows XP, so who knows...) there is no oppotunity for a PageRank-type algorithm to do its work, and my feeling is that Desktop Search search results really suffer for it.
It's like the worst of both worlds, without PageRank it's just a Google-branded keyword search, and worse, a keyword search tool that doesn't really have a sophisticated query language in order to construct more complex searches.
My concern is that Google-the-functionality is getting slowly replaced with Google-the-brand, and that Google will simply become synonymous with "search" rather than "eerily great search."
I'd be interested in other's people's experiences with their off-Internet search tools. I'm sure they are efficient and such, but do you get that same "I know what you're thinking" vibe as you do from Google Internet search?
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
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
We use it on our Intranet at a small goverment agency and it's made a huge difference for us - so I'm a big fan. It's easy to manage too.
I'm not sure however, what niche this product is filling - the box we have allows us to have unlimited subcollections so all of our smaller units can setup their own searches very easily - we just pass which collection we want to hit, and then get some xml back from the box.
So all of our little sub-offices and depts won't ever need their own box.
why would i want a search engine in my cooper?
The Google Mini and the Search Appliance search your corporate extranet and public websites for relevant information so that the whole company has access to the information.
For example, if your company has a huge repository of corporate documents, then you can search the documents using a toolbar IF you have file permissions to the server, directory, and files. But that might take a long time. And your searches remain on your desktop. Someone searching for the same documents will have to initiate their own search. At the present time, I am not aware if you can share your search results with anyone.
If your company uses a search appliance like Google's then searches are saved and indexed as if the user was searching the web. Also the users do not need to have direct access to the files.
For some companies this doesn't make sense, but there is a need for it out there. One application I can think of is a law firm needing to do searches on their own case files.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
2) Do not eat Google Mini.
Maybe then they'd start asking questions. Instead, they're given a nice whitewash where nothing is out of place.
Please help metamoderate.
I think he means 80K total for all programmers :)
#!/
$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/