Google And IBM Team Up Search Technology
An Anonymous Reader wrote to mention a Reuters report on the teaming of IBM and Google over Google's Desktop search technology. From the article: "IBM is linking up its OmniFind corporate search system with Google's free desktop search for business to make it easier for users to locate information throughout an organisation that is often locked up in many separate systems ... Google wins IBM's endorsement among corporate technical managers for its desktop search product and IBM gives corporate information workers an already popular entry point into back-office databases through Google's search. Searchable data ranges from e-mail to computer files to blog postings to corporate repositories of data, images, audio or video, Prial said. Much of this is not available using public Web search tools. Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs."
The solution is to educate people that "shared drive" is indeed shared and provide a separate network share for backups, etc, and make sure that share is not configured to be searchable.
my personal opinion is that the Google appliance is WAY too expensive, which is why enterprises haven't run to get on board with it. When we looked at it, as a small state agency, there was no way we could justify the cost.
Rolling a semi-distributed solution out to everyone's desktop seems like it might (without know any details) be a cheaper way to do it. It's not like there aren't CPU cycles just going to waste there or anything....
my $0.02