Rumor: Google To Launch Hosted Site Search, Ditch Mini

May 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

I’d love to see this unfold

May 15th, 2008 at 8:54 pm

I was waiting for some thing like that for years.

Better late than never!

May 15th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

The problem with the Mini is/was that they stripped it of document level security making it next to useless. The only solution they offered was this…

“You can create section-level security by placing a proxy web server in front of the Google Mini and password protecting it.”

So there was no real way to filter results effectively. The documents themselves could be password protected but they’d still appear in search results and show the first couple paragraphs. To get anything secure you had to upgrade to the full Search Appliance which costs a whopping $30,000.

So the Google Mini was just a bad product that Google didn’t want to support anymore (remember that Google has a pretty meager support staff since most of their business doesn’t require things like telephone support).

This certainly isn’t some victory for cloud computing it’s just Google trying to save face.

The truth is that Enterprise search is a problem for Google in general. My informal tests of the Google Mini (I got to evaluate it) showed that it didn’t yield much better results than the equivalent Sharepoint solution. Google’s problem with the enterprise market is that their tricks don’t work in an environment with security and relatively low traffic. So a salary sheet might see virtually no traffic or links (since only upper management can see it) which puts it low on the “page rank” model but it’s exactly what should be at the top of corporate search results (for those who can see it)

May 15th, 2008 at 10:12 pm

All those internal documents and pages leaking out the firewall ? I don’t think our IT department would like that very much.

May 15th, 2008 at 10:34 pm

I’m underwhelmed with all of you, especially you Michael.
First, this isn’t new news. Google already sells this product (under a ridiculous nmae, CSBE). Go to google.com/sitesearch. We use it for our site and LOVE it. As for the Mini its great. It powers the intranet and DOES have doc level security (using basic auth). Any real news on TechCrunch?

May 16th, 2008 at 9:56 am

@ceejayoz

if u ACTUALLY READ WHAT IT CAN DO , u can give it COMPLETELY custom XML INDEXES THAT WOULD BE BLOCKED FROM ROBOTS.TXT THUS NOT IN THE INDEX BUT IN YOUR SITE SEARCH. I FEEL THE NEED TO TYPE ONLY IN CAPITAL LETTERS .

May 16th, 2008 at 10:51 am

This is a no brainer for Google, about time. I have a ton of clients who wouldn’t hesitate to add this to their sites, but would be a hard sell to add the appliance.

May 18th, 2008 at 9:34 pm

Tom is quite right, as Google’s culture has not yet fitted into the cultures of cooperations where security and regulations rule. Though in theory Google might change the factors of page ranks for cooperations, however, culture conflict is the major obstacle. In addition, regulations in different countries might require confidential info not to be off-premise for whatever reasons. Google really needs to find some marketing people from Microsoft to help its business for enterprises.

May 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am

It’s difficult to understand something that is yet not published (as we all remember from the Google Phone). With Microsoft and Coveo agressively pushing into this market, it would not be wise for Google to back out of the Google Mini as it provides an entry solution to organizations at an incredible price point. This can not be replaced by a hosted solution.

The Google Mini was created specifically to address the issue of how can an organization have Google Search across its internal content. “…allow businesses to search their websites and other data stores in the cloud.” simply does not address that.

What you’ll probably see is an enhanced Custom Search Edition that will allow organizations to search through their Google Apps Data.