Re: [SAGE] Google Mini Appliance?

[Chris Gordon <sage@linux-dr.net>]

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 17:57 -0600, 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?

I've worked with one of their search appliances (mid 2003 IIRC) before
and would assume this works somewhat similarly (though obviously
searching different types of content).  The hardest part of using it was
putting it in the rack (and it was just a simple 1U box).  It appeared
to run Linux underneath, but they just exposed a web interface for
configuration and management.  

When first booted, it defaulted to a specific IP address.  You connect
tot that and set the relevant network information for your installation.
Then you filled in which URLs you wanted it to crawl, the time to start
the crawls and the frequency of crawls and it went to work.

The results where provided via a different web interface that users
could hit to search -- your own little google for your content.  I think
(would make a lot of sense) that you could use the google API to really
embed the search into an existing website.

This was by far the easiest web content search system to setup and run.

Hope that helps.

Chris