Search technology firm Google has launched its first
hardware appliance for small and medium sized
businesses.
Google Mini is an integrated hardware/software search appliance
that indexes all content within a company’s intranet or public
website and is available for £1995, including one year’s
support.
"Content is dramatically increasing everywhere and it is no
longer limited to documents, spreadsheets and presentations," said
Roberto Solimene, Enterprise sales director, Google Europe.
"With more web pages, weblogs and other content, businesses of
every size are having a hard time keeping track of it all. With
Google, you can help your customers and employees quickly find the
information they need."
Connected to the corporate network and given the correct URL,
the Google Mini will crawl through web pages and any documents
linked to an internal or external website. It will also create its
own search page on that site.
Rajen Sheth, Google Mini product manager said, “It is simple to
deploy but extensible. All search results are created in XML so you
can customise design. There is no tagging necessary, but if you
have meta tags then you can make use of them such as filtering
search results.”
Sheth said companies using the system were finding information
they did not know they had.
Eric Peterson, a Jupiterresearch analyst specialising in site
technologies and operations, said the Google Mini was a good option
for small and medium businesses. "Attractive pricing combined with
the good name of Google makes it a must-look opportunity," he
said.
The system does not search through corporate e-mail, although
this feature may become available as Google works on integrating
its Mini with the Google Desktop product. The services agreement
allowed customer free upgrades to the product for a year, Sheth
said.