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The Google Search Server

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-know-for-kids dept.

An anonymous reader submitted a reasonably indepth review of the Google search appliance. The guys from anandtech put it through it's paces, and included a variety of pictures and comments on one of those Google products most of us will probably never play with.

4 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. AnandTech not very search optimization saavy by DeadSea · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Mini considers any unique URL string to be a unique document, which makes sense (but is a bit surprising the first time that you run an index). After four hours of indexing, the Mini had managed to reach its document limit and we had to improvise.
    Anybody who doesn't know that search engines consider each url to contain a unique document does't know much about getting their site to be properly represented in search engines.

    Their solution was to create a list of urls for the appliance to crawl. If they had to do that for the search appliance, there is no way that googlebot, msnbot, or yahoo slurp is going to be able to properly index their site.

    Your public accessable urls need to managed and canonicalized through judicious use of robots.txt, 302 redirects, site wide linking, and just plain thinking out the layout of your site.

  2. It's "its"! by dtmos · · Score: 5, Informative
    The guys from anandtech put it through it's paces

    It's really easy: It's "his", hers", and "its". Even a flower knows!

    --cycling through grammar Nazi mode. Please wait.

  3. Re:where's the raid? by slim · · Score: 5, Informative

    I guess if you want RAID, you pay more than $3,000.

    What you're really buying here is closed-source software, wrapped in the hardware that turns it into an "appliance". Assume $2,000 of that $3,000 pays for the software.

    By specifying the hardware in this way, and by keeping the BIOS and root passwords to themselves, Google greatly simplify their support role.

    This is common practice: an IBM HMC (Hardware Management Console) is a 1U PC with a custom Linux distribution and the management software preinstalled. You don't get the root password; you just use the software as delivered.

  4. For those who're interested... by Homicide · · Score: 5, Informative

    I admin a full blown Google Search Appliance, the mimi's big brother.

    If you want the specs:
    Dual Xeon 2.6GHz
    12GB RAM
    4 250GB HD's in RAID(something) with a hot-swap spare.

    Never tried taking off the cover though, since we want to keep the warranty.

    All of the money you pay is a license for the software on the box, the system itself is effectively free, so once the 2 year warranty expires, you've effectively got a nice powerful linux box for free. You can keep running the software, but without any support.

    As for performance, this thing works great, we have about 250,000 pages that it can index, both public and private (and it can do searches cleverly checknig username/pasword to see if you should have access to certain results), and we've had nothing but positive responses from our users. The results come up quickly, they're the results people want, and the results that management think should be at the top, are at the top.