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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.
If it's the same as its big brother, then it boots up into RedHat Linux. You can watch all the usual bootup things happening, just not interfere with them, as the keyboard is ignored.
It does end up at a login prompt, but you're not given any usernames or passwords to access it.
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.
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.