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35 Comments
- kev26, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30This isn't really a fair assessment of the Google Mini. All the limitations mentioned in the article were explained to me during the sales process (purchased it about 4 months ago now). If you blindly buy one and then compare it to the Enterprise edition, then yes, these things look bad.
I for one, love the Google Mini. It does exactly what it says and very well at that. I've set one up for a large R&D and Support operation in a Software company and it is kicking ass. The managers totally think it was worth the money and are considering rolling more out to other parts of the company. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19# 1 Reason:
It looks like a steamrolled smurf. - sadsac, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8A better question is;
What's wrong with cheesy blog "articles" that make it to the front page of digg? - toolio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6according to google, the pagerank that the web uses is dramatically different than the applicances for this reason -- Most intranet docs don't have hyperlinking. There are thousands of things that go into generating a "pagerank" and hyperlinking is toned down in the appliances.
- carguy84, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Since the mini doesn't run with RAID, is there a way to back up the index and or config for the machine? It'd be a real pain if you lost everything just because of a dead hard drive.
RAID is the reason why we ended up not going with the mini. Price is the reason why we ended up not going with the Enterprise. Damn that double edged sword...:( - secretdiffusion, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Everything in there is perfectly acceptable for the mini. I mean, you get exactly what you pay for. The small size and a cheap(er) price for a small company. The more expensive and better edition is for the large companies that can shell out $10,000 on the industrial-strength....whatever-it-does. I'm not quite sure... XD
And the pagerank doesn't apply to documents! As it said, 90% of all documents don't contain hyperlinks. Just do a search query containing "filetype:doc" (without the quotes of course) and it will only show the .doc files that are within the search query. No page rank needed. - diecastbeatdown, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5we have one of the "industrial" ones at my work. it was one of those "ohh, lets buy it" things and now it sits in a rack without power just collecting dust. joy.
- philz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You can't really lose the index, can you? I mean, if the thing would burn down, you could just start indexing again over the weekend.
- rino, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Most of this is rubbish. I bought a GSA Mini last year and yeah, everything I printed out stated exactly what it did and did not do.
When I made the purchase they only had the $3k version with 100k doc limit && the $30k model. They have since provided me with a growth path.
The only limitation I’ve run into is the fact you can only have one collection.
I believe the author is not very well informed, has an axe to grind, or must have reading comprehension issues. - RexStJames, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Hey asshat, did you consider that it may be the SAME PERSON that posted both comments? The timestamps work.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4You know, Google Desktop will happily index both windows mounts (just tried it), SMB mounts (just tried it) and NFS mounts (just tried it), and it's free. It seems to me that the reason that many small business seem to be purchasing the Google Mini just went out the window.
- KidVicious, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5But people want their non-HTML files to be ranked, since if you don't apply pagerank to them what sets Google search apart from any other search? The reason people pay money to use Google's search algorithm is because of pagerank, and if the advantage of that algorithm is rendered null and void in 90% percent of you're files, then its basically worthless.
In other words, the problem is not that HTML files show up when they want to see documents, but that documents that exist with more relevance to the query are surmounted by less-relevent files just because they contain hyperlinks, making the search useless to anyone who doesn't have all HTML files. - Fisban, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've bought and configured several google minis and I've never had any complaints from our clients. You have to match the right tool to the right job. 3K for a decent search engine is a great deal and it does a fantastic job at searching sites and returning relevant results.
For larger clients I've also worked with other enterprise level search like mondosoft and sharepoint portal search both cost in the 50 000$ range and do a much better job if you want a more complicated search or if you want to include document libraries. But google mini isn't aimed at that market and if thats the market you are in then you should be prepared to either pay the higher price for the full google appliance or invest that money in another search product. - vigil, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm sorry...if your organization does not have the money to invest in a real product you really can't expect much. You can't have it both ways. The large scale appliance is built for scalability. That's what it's there for. The mini is for real small shops who can't afford (or understand) the benefits of drooping the full package.
When push comes to shove $10,000 is nothing for a medium/large scale IT shop. I know at the company I work for the servers we purchase on average go for at a minimum $8000, and that's w/o all of the things offered by this package? Hell, even $30,000/yr isn't a huge deal if you take into account licensing for large scale products (like, just as an example, IBM Lotus products) for a company of about 4000 people can be upwards of $100k a year.
The only valid argument I find in this article is the page rank issue, and I admit I know nothing about it so that may be its one true merit. - esconsult1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3In this case, using something like http://www.swish-e.org is just as good. I've always known that the Google search appliances were a ripoff, because interlinking just does not exist in 99.99% of corporate settings.
- gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5This isn't a cheesy blog article. This is an interesting read that I haven't seen anywhere else.
- razorcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I appreciate all of your comments and criticisms. In some ways, I think my point was mis-interpreted.
What's important about search is finding relevant information right?
A couple things which should not influence your purchasing process when choosing a search solution:
1. We're getting shafted by Microsoft and IBM on licensing, why not Google? At what point are you just paying a premium to have the Google logo on the box?
2. I love Google, let's buy it because it's cool. Yes, I can understand techno-lust, and cool-for-the-sake-of-cool. No, I don't understand making bad business decisions based on "cool" alone.
3. Wow! Look at all those documents we lost, this thing is totally worth it! Again, relevance. Just because you *found* the documents (assuming you knew where to tell the box to start looking), doesn't mean you found the *right* documents. You can find your documents with something like Google Desktop, but finding documents is only the very basic part of search.
Finding contextually relevant documents should be what's most important. - h0dg3s, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Blogspam.
- jimmywang817, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1secret diffusion was mentioned that many people may have the wrong picture on pagerank and specifically pageranks role on the Google Search Servers. There's actually a blog post on the Google Enterprise Blog about this exact thing: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2006/03/enterprise-search-relevancy-in-eye-of_15.html
- kev26, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, there is an option to backup the configuration of the Mini. No option to backup the actual index.
- cookedchicken, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The Google Search appliances including the Google-mini are just way too expensive! Corporate and Enterprise search is a very competitive market-place right now and a lot of corporate search products and open source search products are either catching up or surpassing Google in both quality and price. The google search appliances also have very annoying limitations, in both the number of documents it will index, the sizes of the indexes it creates, and how many words of a document the spider will put in the index and keyword database. There are a lot of free / cheaper solutions out there that can do a much better job. A lot of people are doing some great stuff with Lucene and Nutch: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/ which can full-text index millions of documents. DtSearch is also pretty good, its not free but its pretty powerful, easy to hack, has versions for Linux and Win and can index up to a Terra-byte of text. I recently indexed 3 million PDF's with both Lucene and DtSearch, on a little 3.8ghz p4, 1gb ram running Linux and they both worked great. Moral of the story: You can build a search engine that's as powerful as the top of the line Google search appliances with a Linux box and a little elbow grease. If Google were to take some of the restrictions off their top end models and lower the price a bunch, then the plug-in search solution Google offers might be a little more attractive.
- serra, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I know what's wrong with it: It's too expensive for what it is!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have to agree, this solution is fairly expensive, but what you pay for is incredible ease of use. You can set this up in under an hour, unpacking included, and it'll be ready.
I wish it indexed about 3 times the docs than it's current levels. We use indexing at work and a 400,000 document index doesn't take up more than 500 megs, so space isn't an issue here. - FarcePest, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2The only thing worse than blog spam is whining about blog spam, or comments that are nothing but "bloglink" (further down). It's just noise. And this isn't even blog spam. Sure, it's a blog, but it's original content, and not just a link to someone else's article. Whether or not you agree or disagree is another question, but at least have something thoughtful to say if you're going to say anything.
- vadud3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How did you crawl NFS using GDS?
- zimm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1OK... who let the clueless have a blog?
and who got this crap to the front page... - RamMasterRay, on 10/12/2007, -8/+8The text is 400 pixels wide and light grey in a 9pt font on a white background and there is blog in the url.
- GeneralSun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I might read the article if it had a color scheme that allowed me to read it.
- strangerzero, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I'm working with Enterprise edition and it doesn't work that well either. After weeks of messing with it and trying to get it to work with some test searches it still fails to find everything when crawling even a small number of web pages and documents.
Buyer beware. - duder, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3give ya $20(US) for it
- SniperGX1, on 10/12/2007, -9/+6Heh, google branded hardware? I bet they have an integrated screen on it that crams ads down the admins throat
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2bloglink
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1no digg. stupid blog link.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -17/+5What the hell is Google Mini!?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -16/+4Nevermind, I just Googled it.
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