Re: [SAGE] Google Mini Appliance?

[Allan West <allan@cookie.org>]

Joseph Noonan wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of this thing:
> 
>     <http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/index.html>
> 
> The people in MARCOM want to install one of these as part of our (much 
> needed) web site overhaul.  I've read what I could on the site, 
> basically everything but watched the movie (I refuse to watch movies for 
> product information).  Frankly, if it were anybody but Google I would 
> already have said 'no' we are not buying any 'appliance' that doesn't 
> even have information about the way it works as part of its product 
> information. But it is Google, so it probably works well for searching, 
> so I'll dig a bit more.
> 
> Has anybody used one?
> 
> Did you like it?  Did your users?
> 
> How does it work?  Is is some sort of proxy, through which clients go on 
> the way to your content?   Is it some sort of server that the web 
> designers puts links to on the page?  Or something else?
> 
> Thanks,

My institution has a pretty yellow 1-U box which searches the whole 
campus' web and is very handy. It's a full-fledged server, and basically 
acts as a locally-focused google engine. It traverses our campus sites 
and updates its database frequently, since it doesn't have to search the 
whole internet. It obeys the robots.txt files on our servers, and the 
campus authorities also gave it a non-local IP address to prevent it 
from accessing anything restricted to local viewing.

I'm not familiar with our contract, what the model name is (we've had it 
for years) or whether it feeds up the food chain to Google to update the 
universal search results. I know the folks who maintain the campus 
search are pretty happy with it, and it's a snap to use it for just a 
sub-site by making a search URL with a "site" tag, eg.:

---begin form snippet---
<form action="http://search.ufl.edu/web/" method="get" name="gs">
     <input type="hidden" name="site" value="clasnet.ufl.edu">
     <input type="text" name="query" size=15 value="Search MySite" 
maxlength=1000><br>
     <input type="submit" value="Search" name="submit">
</form>
---end form snippet---

I suspect that you'd like it more than building a search mechanism from 
scratch, especially if your organization has multiple servers, or 
documents managed by divergent groups.

Oh, I found some details on our server by putting "google" into our 
search site. The announcement of the google appliance's installation is 
here:
	<http://docweb.cns.ufl.edu/update/u021004a/u021004a.html>
Allan