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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."
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!
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This puts it well within the reach of Slashdot.
Never again will we have to use the crappiest search function ever! God be praised!
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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?'
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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.
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For the business that requires one of these, $5k is quite affordable. If the business cant afford $5k, Id be quite happy to say they should reevaluate their need for one.
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?
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