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The Google Search Server
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.
While this is an interesting article, it really isn't much of a review of the Google Mini. All they do is take it apart, take pictures, and tell you that they set it up after a little bit of trouble. There is nothing about how well it actually works. No benchmarks. No comparisons. They just say that it worked well and leave it at that. Anandtech has had more indepth reviews of mice before.
It is more information that I have seen anywhere else though.
Did it strike anyone else as insane that this thing only had one hard drive? For $3,000, where's the raid array? Ok, sure it's a search appliance and doesn't really hold any mission critical data, but if the hard drive crashes, how long is your search functionality going to be down? You'll need to get a replacement drive and rebuild your whole database (a slow crawl process). What about your configuration settings?
A few months ago, we asked for a demo of the product. My main involvement was to help compare with our existing search strategy. Just to cut to the chase, we generally had a very positive experience with it. Searches would bring up what we wanted more often than not. Our existing search system, which was based around IIS and custom SQL code, was pretty good, though it couldn't beat Google for pulling up relevant pages. We did have a few quirky things happen, though.
We had a couple times when the appliance locked up and had to be rebooted. That was probably the most distressing as it had to be on 24x7 to support our organization and I wasn't looking forward to the help desk calls.
More amusing, though, was the way it crawled content. Google works like any other crawler - it goes around and clicks hyperlinks. Unfortunately it's not too bright, not paying attention to the text of the hyperlink, like if it said "delete" or something like that.
Unfortunately I had a poorly secured application that Google was able to sneak into via another link I wasn't aware of. It held the custom links for each of our departments to display a personalized set of links on the home page. Unfortunately it went through the admin tool and clicked every delete link it could find. I was paged the next morning and was fairly unhappy. My fault, though.
The irony is that the budget money evaporated and we aren't getting it after all.
What happens after the BIOS screen and before you "log in" to the web interface? Surely it runs some sort of operating system?
There are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary, those who don't and those who are sick of this lame joke.
RTFA (and actually read it). The Google Mini has a built-in limit of 100,000 documents; it's not that it can't index more because of a lack of CPU power or HD space or whatever, it's just that if you want (or need) more than that, Google wants you to buy their regular Search Appliances instead.
All this info can also be gotten from http://www.google.com/enterprise/, which is exactly 1 (one) click away from Google's index page.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I wish we would get one of those google appliances instead of whatever horrible search "solution" we have now. I use google with site:mysite.com to search our website.
When looking at the google appliances, I thought it was really cool how it learns your specific terms and acronyms and it will do the "Did you mean correctspellingword?" like google does.
Pretty slick from what I gather. I have no direct experience except for google proper.
The pictures are pretty and I'll assume the thing works. Some folks, however, won't buy it because they don't want their intranets to work like you or I might expect. Let me explain.
I work for a large TLA govt agency. I've begged our people to get something like this. I know, from working with our folks and doing my own digging, that we have a wealth of knowledge tucked away, here and there, on local group shares and out-of-the-way internal web sites. And yet our internal search function is ludicrously bad. It works off "key words" that are simply a manually maintained (I think) list of useless, often off-the-mark descriptions of approved sites of general interest. Special-interest pages are not indexed in this way. The crawler, if you want to call it that, is terrible at doing its job. Enter a string of text and get a hit on a known, universally accessible web page containing that exact string? Not a chance. I test it occasionally and find that it remains as ridiculous as ever, with a level of functionality that would have been technologically uninteresting the better part of a decade ago but is, in this day, infuriating to users.
The reason for all this is that if our intranet were automatically crawled, well indexed, and truly searchable, people would be able to find things. People in Work Area A would be able to see how they might be impacted by something going on in Work Area B. Horrors! That would mean that management would lose much of their ability to keep employees selectively in the dark.
All this came to a head a number of years ago. At that time, our intranet content was maintained by IT. Anybody that wanted a site (literally anybody) could just get their first-line manager to approve the request and they'd get server space and some help setting up a page or two. The exchange of information that started happening was highly disruptive, so a "Communications and Liaison" office was set up that wrenched control of the intranet from IT and required (what seems to be essentially political) approval of the business case for anything that went online. No web sites unless the Communications gods approved.
Nowadays, the employees of one division are only vaguely aware that other divisions exist or have web sites. Each individual fiefdom is protected from the ravages of communications that don't strictly follow the org chart lines. I guess the executives in charge are happy in their insulated little worlds.
If you're going to sell an effective intranet search tool, you're going to have to face the fact that lots of large organization leaders (and you find the same attitudes in both the public and the private sector) would recoil in horror at the thought of having their intranet be effectively searchable. It's too threatening.
Given the actual content of their review, I'm very surprised they didn't pull the drive and have a stroll around the filesystem. They've pretty much toasted the warranty as it is, anyway.
offtopic?
At anandtech's website,
to test the ability of their google search server,
I searched for the title of that article.
You would think it would point me to the article;
it did not.
I like this kind of reviews. A bit of what packaging looks like (noone writes that, although it's quite interesting for me personally: how does packaging for a $10000 unit differ from a $300 maching), a bit of a view from the inside, a bit about the software. Nothing too complicated, because that would make the article dull to read. What the article provides is the general feel of the product.
One thing I wonder is that Google can probably use the included modem to download private company data which the server caches (if the company bought the server for internal use).
Keep in mind, AnandTech's previous search systems were all on the DB end, so it only counted each article once. Google Mini on the other hand counts the normal view of an article, the print view, etc. It is a very important consideration if you're moving from DB-based searching.
I am currently in the midst of setting up setting up a Google mini. I have noticed most articles mention that getting the *initial* crawl setup is quite easy. It is. Even this article mentions "The last thing that we worked on was making the Mini look like it is part of AnandTech.com. There are two ways to go about this in the Mini admin. One is to use their built-in page layout helper, which allows you to wrap the search screens with a custom header and footer. The other way (which we prefer) is to use the XSLT Stylesheet editor and modify the stylesheet to meet your needs." But the screen shots nor the article go on to mention this process of which, I have found very little information. Also, one pitfall is that the MINI offers only 1 collection, meaning that if you want to search multiple sites you will have to filter content by URLS, i.e /my_site1/:* for one collection and my_site2/:*. And keyword searches are made across the whole collection. Also, having a Google mini I have access to the support site and forums. Through out all the forums I have yet to see a Google associate reply. I have contacted Google four times stating that I needed help getting a correct xlst sheet working aside from their default. I seem to be getting Macro replies from Google stating that they do not provide support on XSLT. I think this is considered ranting. My apologies.