The Google Mini - A look at Google's entry-level search appliance
by Liz van Dijk on December 21, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
After working with the Google Mini for a while in our own lab, it's easy to understand the appeal of a functional, well-tuned search appliance. Correctly configured, the Mini can dramatically enhance users' ability to find both web content, and files and their contents, on the network, and is likely to quickly repay the initial investment with increased productivity.
In terms of price, Google positions the Mini competitively, especially considering the amount of time it would take a company to implement their own fully functional search engine and maintain it. The Mini's array of standard features and flexibility make it too important not to consider.
However, we feel that even though its features are very rich and full of possibilities, the Mini is definitely not the "plug-and-play" machine Google advertises. Though the initial setup might be quick, there is a great deal of difference between the default "search bot" behavior and the fully integrated/optimized searching experience that the Mini is capable of, and we felt that threshold was still just a tad too high. We also noted the rather odd feature restrictions of the Mini as compared to the Google Search Appliance. The restrictions on the maximum number of pages to index is perfectly understandable, but the reasoning that smaller companies would have less use for advanced security systems doesn't make as much sense. A small company looking for an easy and cheap way out might end up surprised by the complexity involved in mastering the behavior of search engines.
To be fair, there simply is no true solution to the search-optimization problem yet. Optimizing searches to best match user behavior has always been a matter of close-up analysis, and the steps Google is taking to facilitate this process are still quite remarkable. As much as we would have loved to have a little peek at what was really going on inside that little blue box, we were satisfied to get a closer look at Google's efforts to put its technology to work in businesses all over the world, and the way they look to increase their users' satisfaction by consistency and simplicity. Though there is definitely room for improvement on the administrative side, the Mini definitely provides its end users the power and familiar feel of the Google web search.
In closing, we'd like to thank Peter Griffin of Google, who helped us out a great deal while exploring the Mini's features.
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Genx87 - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link
The lack of security takes this out of an serious contention for a small or medium size business who can afford this device. The cost takes it out of the contention for business's who are small enough to not care about security as much.Having worked for a small business ~30 people. There is no way they would authorize me to spend that kind of cash on a device that indexes our documents. At my current employer which is ~200 people we would have the budget, but the lack of security will put the smackdown on it.
bfoster68 - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
just to clear something up. You don't implement a raided solution as a form of backup. You implement it for fault tolerance so that if a drive fails your system stays up. I don't know what market segment google planned for this appliance but my company would require a fault tolerance solution providing 4 9's uptime.my guess is this appliance is for the small business segment and the hardware was designed with this in mind.
Any solution for a fortune 500 company would require at a minimum dual redundant power supplies and a hardware based, hot swapable raid configuration, Error corrrecting ram and many other features.
I am not very familiar with this product so please feel free to correct any inaccuracies.
Just my two cents.
Bill
dblevitan - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Has anyone tried taking out the hard drive, connecting it to another computer, and looking at what's on it? I'm sure it can't be too hard to see what's actually running on the computer.n0nsense - Sunday, December 23, 2007 - link
You'll probably find Linux based system inside running MySQL and the engine :)For the rest, the prescot CPU and 1 HD used because they cost less.
When you save 100$ on each box, it is 100,000$ for 1000 boxes :)
Lizz - Saturday, December 22, 2007 - link
Getting inside the Mini is probably not impossible, and we considered quite a bunch of methods, simply out of curiosity.However, the focus of this review is to give our readers a look at what the Mini actually offers those interested in purchasing one, so we decided not to give it too much focus. :)
drothgery - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
At least on my employer's Google mini, I found that I could add cookies to the request header.andyleung - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
For green purpose, maybe google will do the magic of using AMD Geode or VIA CPU that consumes no more than 5W of power in peak time and still process 250 queries per second. Good job google, I am looking forward to seeing you doing this one day.Taft12 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Agreed, especially given the light load required for this appliance's purpose. In the meantime, if they must use a chip single-core desktop chip, why not one of the Core 2-based Celerons?Great review! I knew it would get bogged down in a hardware discussion though given the audience here.
PBMax - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
This device is an appliance. It is not a "computer" in the traditional sense of a multipurpose server. I had to fight that idea when my previous company went into the appliance business. When you buy an appliance you buy what it can do and not how it does it. They sell these systems as 50,000 document and 300,000 document systems. So that is the benchmark for performance. As for RAID. This is an entry level system and as such is stripped down. I'm sure the higher end models support RAID. I went to a Google Enterprise seminar and they were talking about search appliances from the Mini to the OneBox and prices ranged from $1500 to over a million. Also I don't think the sysadmin has access to the machine at a level that they can backup anything but the settings. But since this is a search appliance they should be able to restore the box and import their settings and have it reindex their network.HotdogIT - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
"In closing, we'd like to thank Peter Griffin of Google, who helped us out a great deal while exploring the Mini's features."Peter. Griffin.
Winnar!