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."

Comments

Mini me?

[Mathiasdm]

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!

Is Google moving out of their strength?

[Sialagogue]

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?