http://googleenterprise.blogsp.....grade.html

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.

Check this out - http://developer.amazonwebserv.....amp;#89123

I can’t see any medium or large enterprise letting their documents leak outside of the firewall, esp as a fair degree of business docs are highly confidential.

A lot of the cloud based solutions are being used by small companies who are either naive of the issues or frankly don’t care and feel the upside outweighs the problems.

So I can only imagine that if Google are doing a cloud-based solution that it is aimed at this end of the market (which is not even the customer base for the mini). I wonder whether they will do a spin up of Google Doc Search - which already lets you share crawler data about your local drive to the cloud so that you can ’search your harddrive’ from multiple locations

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 .

“Custom Search uses the same index as Google.com to provide world-class relevance and speed.”

That is *not* the same thing.

“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)

I assume just the mini will die and the full Google Appliance will remain. I think the driving force here is to kill the mini which is $3000 and push corporations to the full appliance at $30,000.

Better late than never!

Peter
do you follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban