Industry sources indicate that Google plans to launch a hardware search appliance for businesses with less than 10,000 documents on their website or intranet sometime in the next quarter. The Mini appliance will be suitable for companies like small legal firms who have information all over the place, and the Google Mini search appliance will offer a way to tie it all together.
Small e-commerce operations or businesses that rely on their websites to store information will also be good candidates for the Mini. “It’s a popular a way to organise data for customer access on a website. The Google Mini is essentially a web server. The 1U rack-mountable box plugs into a network Ethernet port. You then configure it to index your company intranet or website. Once it’s up and running, the Mini is designed to let you search across all of your company’s documents and websites using the Google interface and features.
The scalable nature of the Mini is designed to let companies expand the device capabilities as the number of documents expand.
Companies that buy the Mini will have the choice of using either Google’s recognizable look and feel or customizing the results. They can also make small changes using the wizard interface, according to Google, or you can completely change the look of search results using XML tools.
Google says the Mini can index more than 220 file formats. The Mini indexes the first 2.5MB of any HTML document and the first 30MB of binary files (e.g, Microsoft Word or PDF files). You can, according to Google, set the Mini to crawl and index content at set intervals. The Mini’s web-based interface is designed to let you access administration features remotely.
The Google Mini is also designed to help you improve your website efficiency by generating reports on page errors and broken links. It also provides reports on search term frequency.
We will have more details on the launch of the Mini in the next issue of Smart Company magazine.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers