Review: Google Mini search facility

The Google Mini search appliance is designed for small businesses that need to add a search facility to their website, but are on a tight budget.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to get it working. Just plug the Mini into the Lan, point it at the sites you want to index and leave the famous Google technology to get on with it.

There are lots of things you could use a Google Mini for. On an intranet, for example, it offers fast access to information regardless of where it’s located, with built-in support for over 200 document types including Adobe pdfs and anything created with Microsoft Office, as well as HTML pages.

Or it could be used to support public websites, with facilities to customise the search interface and integrate it into your own applications.

The hardware involved is a very modest 1U rackmount server, powered by a pair of ancient Pentium III processors, 2GB of memory and 120GB hard disk.

All this is completely sealed inside a bright blue case, with a next-day swap-out service to keep you working should anything go wrong.

Installation is simply a matter of plugging in the colour-coded network cables provided and connecting the power.

There’s no on/off switch – the appliance powers up straight away, loads its Linux-based operating system, then plays a tune to tell you it’s ready.

That done, you need to configure the network settings then browse to the management port, log on and tell the software which URLs you’re interested in.

A Google crawler can then be sent off to examine those paths, searching through all the documents it finds before building a search index.

Some patience is required, depending on the number of URLs involved, the speed of the target servers, type of connection and so on.

However, you’ll soon have a working index that can be searched using an interface familiar to Google users the world over. And most of our searches returned results within a second or two – just like the real thing.

In addition, you get to influence the results by suggesting synonyms for search terms, and with custom Keymatches where highlighted URLs are displayed when matching keywords are specified.

In our tests, for example, we were able to point users at the PCW website whenever the terms ‘pc’ or ‘computer’ were used.

We were also able to use our own graphics rather than the standard Google logo, and change the way the results were ordered.

We did this through the management GUI (graphical user interface) while, for the more advanced developer, it’s possible to upload an XSLT style sheet.

For the ultimate in customisation, you can feed XML search results directly into applications.

A built-in scheduler simplifies the task of building and refreshing search indexes and, if the 50,000 URL/document limit of the standard Google Mini isn’t enough, models that support more (up to 300,000) are also available.

Of course, it’s not perfect. Special measures are needed to protect documents you don’t want people to see and, although easy to deploy, it can take a while to fully appreciate what the Mini can do and to set it up to suit your requirements.

However, it’s not difficult, and the results really do speak for themselves.

Specifications:
1U rackmount search appliance
Dual 1.26GHz Pentium III processors
2GB memory
120GB hard disk drive
Dual 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet interfaces
Red Hat Linux O/S
Google search engine technology
One-year telephone support and swap-out warranty