Entered CNET Catalog: 07/22/2005
SKU: GO0144
Manufacturer: Google
Manufacturer description
How many vital documents are buried and forgotten somewhere on your website or corporate intranet? How much faster could your business grow if your employees and prospective customers could find product, support or sales information, instantly and on demand? Meet the Google Mini. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make the most of their digital assets, the Mini is a hardware and software search appliance that delivers the power and productivity of Google search across your organization's documents and websites.User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1
User Rating: 
4/10
Google mini is not there yet
Pros: XML api (dont they all have that?)
Cons: buggy product, pricey and not customizable
Review:
Google mini is not there yet, i'm working for a company that purchased this machine, and frankly, i had more trouble than configuring microsoft indexing service:
1. The basic pricing includes only one search collection, which means you cannot customize more than 1 look and feel for search (you can have subcollections, but all search pages and search result pages must look the same). The only option you have is to use the XML engine, and write everything from scratch (paging, sorting, filtering etc). Another option would be purchasing more collections, or buy the enterprise server...
2. The software is still VERY buggy, a small example will be trying to create a sub-collection with an underscore ("_")
this will look like its ok, but the search mechanism does not work when you try and send "&restrict=subcollection_name"
3. Google supposed to search any kind of document, true, but initial crawl and search resulted with almost all word documents to be displayed with a wrong title (unless your word documents are VERY simple), all the word documents in our organization have a header/footer, where the actual document name/title is stored, google did not index the header nor the footer of the .doc, plus, all results i received for word docs were titled "subject:" (because its the first cell in a table)
Maybe these problems are minor, but they are very basic in my point of view. I do not recommend purchasing this appliance if you need anything more than the basic functionality, the product is simply not mature enough.
1. The basic pricing includes only one search collection, which means you cannot customize more than 1 look and feel for search (you can have subcollections, but all search pages and search result pages must look the same). The only option you have is to use the XML engine, and write everything from scratch (paging, sorting, filtering etc). Another option would be purchasing more collections, or buy the enterprise server...
2. The software is still VERY buggy, a small example will be trying to create a sub-collection with an underscore ("_")
this will look like its ok, but the search mechanism does not work when you try and send "&restrict=subcollection_name"
3. Google supposed to search any kind of document, true, but initial crawl and search resulted with almost all word documents to be displayed with a wrong title (unless your word documents are VERY simple), all the word documents in our organization have a header/footer, where the actual document name/title is stored, google did not index the header nor the footer of the .doc, plus, all results i received for word docs were titled "subject:" (because its the first cell in a table)
Maybe these problems are minor, but they are very basic in my point of view. I do not recommend purchasing this appliance if you need anything more than the basic functionality, the product is simply not mature enough.
