PC Pro (www.pcpro.co.uk) announced on October 20 that the search engine giant Google (www.google.com) is launching its Search Appliance (www.google.com/appliance) across Europe, two years after its introduction in the US. The “Google in a box” solution promises to provide a Google-like performance for documents held inside corporate Intranets. The Google Search Appliance is a combined hardware and software solution. Inside a standard rack mount unit is a standard Intel based server running Linux. On top of which is the Google index and search engines.
The search engine can understand over 250 file formats, including all the major documents such as Microsoft Office, PDF and HTML, and auto detects 28 languages. The documents do need to be available via http or https as the Search Appliance views all documents as a unique URL. Security is seen as a prime consideration and the company says that individuals can be prevented from accessing material they are unauthorised to see.
The basic GB-1001 costs £19000, which includes two years’ worth of software support and can index up to 1.5 million documents and handle up to 300 queries per minute. In addition, Google offers a range of options up to an eight-way clustered solution able to index up to three million documents.
Dave Girouard, Google's General Manager for Enterprise, said that the company has chosen to provide the service in a combined unit because it wants to make sure that customers get a consistent high quality solution that they would expect from Google, and that by supplying a single rack mount unit, most customers can have the unit up, running and indexing their content in 15 to 20 minutes and start having indexed results within a few hours.
