The Google Mini - A look at Google's entry-level search appliance
by Liz van Dijk on December 21, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
So what does it actually do?
The Google Mini, stripped of the fancy wording and vague feature descriptions, is a search bot. It looks for what it's configured to search for, keeps track of it, and keeps looking for more indefinitely, until it has reached its page limit. At that point, it stops adding new pages, but will keep its existing index properly updated. After setting it up and unleashing it on your unsuspecting web and file servers, you will find your Mini slowly gathering results and building up its index.
Once the Mini is online, a user visiting its IP address finds the familiar Google search page. As the indexing progresses, the Mini begins to give the results one would expect. It searches the designated websites, and automatically indexes the designated fileservers for files, as well as the contents of the files. The crawler handles common formats such as .pdf, .doc and .xls (full list available here).
One possible area of concern (which we certainly had) is the Mini's ability to search content that normally can't be accessed without authentication. The Mini includes some basic authentication methods for both websites and file shares. We configured our Mini to crawl our samba fileserver by providing it with an existing account with read rights, and although secure websites definitely provide a bigger challenge, the Mini is equipped for most basic authentication processes. We had no problem configuring the Google Mini to use HTTP-based and HTTPS-based login procedures, although more advanced authentication methods require the more expensive Google Search Appliance.
A full list of all possible authentication methods - and a comparison to what the GSA can do - can be found here.
Setting the Mini up properly might require some snooping into the help documentation (which, ironically, isn't searchable). Note that using the "Make Public" checkbox allows you to make secure search results public. The end result is that everyone would be able to see the corresponding URLs in their search-results page, but will need to authenticate if they choose to open a file that requires authentication to be accessed.
Leaving the "Make Public" checkbox unchecked would require people to authenticate before viewing search results from a secured webserver. However, the Mini doesn't yet support this type of restriction for fileservers, meaning that these files are publicly visible to anyone using the search system, so the Mini's administrator should take precautions not to index confidential files on file servers.
 Adding in some credentials for our secure content. |
Larger organizations may appreciate the ability to use different "collections" for different users or situations (see our previous Mini review for more information on collections). The Mini's administrator can create several collections of, for example, knowledge-base articles and news messages, and have these searched separately. Different front-ends can be added and customized to seamlessly fit the website in question, to make this separation transparent to the user; Anandtech's own search function is an example of this.
Once properly configured, the Google Mini is essentially a basic Google bot. For small intranet-based user groups, this might be all that's ever needed. However, integrating the Google Mini with existing websites supporting a large user base (such as Anandtech.com) calls for some extra functionality to make the addition more seamless, and to take advantage of the full capabilities of the system.
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Genx87 - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link
The lack of security takes this out of an serious contention for a small or medium size business who can afford this device. The cost takes it out of the contention for business's who are small enough to not care about security as much.Having worked for a small business ~30 people. There is no way they would authorize me to spend that kind of cash on a device that indexes our documents. At my current employer which is ~200 people we would have the budget, but the lack of security will put the smackdown on it.
bfoster68 - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
just to clear something up. You don't implement a raided solution as a form of backup. You implement it for fault tolerance so that if a drive fails your system stays up. I don't know what market segment google planned for this appliance but my company would require a fault tolerance solution providing 4 9's uptime.my guess is this appliance is for the small business segment and the hardware was designed with this in mind.
Any solution for a fortune 500 company would require at a minimum dual redundant power supplies and a hardware based, hot swapable raid configuration, Error corrrecting ram and many other features.
I am not very familiar with this product so please feel free to correct any inaccuracies.
Just my two cents.
Bill
dblevitan - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Has anyone tried taking out the hard drive, connecting it to another computer, and looking at what's on it? I'm sure it can't be too hard to see what's actually running on the computer.n0nsense - Sunday, December 23, 2007 - link
You'll probably find Linux based system inside running MySQL and the engine :)For the rest, the prescot CPU and 1 HD used because they cost less.
When you save 100$ on each box, it is 100,000$ for 1000 boxes :)
Lizz - Saturday, December 22, 2007 - link
Getting inside the Mini is probably not impossible, and we considered quite a bunch of methods, simply out of curiosity.However, the focus of this review is to give our readers a look at what the Mini actually offers those interested in purchasing one, so we decided not to give it too much focus. :)
drothgery - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
At least on my employer's Google mini, I found that I could add cookies to the request header.andyleung - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
For green purpose, maybe google will do the magic of using AMD Geode or VIA CPU that consumes no more than 5W of power in peak time and still process 250 queries per second. Good job google, I am looking forward to seeing you doing this one day.Taft12 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Agreed, especially given the light load required for this appliance's purpose. In the meantime, if they must use a chip single-core desktop chip, why not one of the Core 2-based Celerons?Great review! I knew it would get bogged down in a hardware discussion though given the audience here.
PBMax - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
This device is an appliance. It is not a "computer" in the traditional sense of a multipurpose server. I had to fight that idea when my previous company went into the appliance business. When you buy an appliance you buy what it can do and not how it does it. They sell these systems as 50,000 document and 300,000 document systems. So that is the benchmark for performance. As for RAID. This is an entry level system and as such is stripped down. I'm sure the higher end models support RAID. I went to a Google Enterprise seminar and they were talking about search appliances from the Mini to the OneBox and prices ranged from $1500 to over a million. Also I don't think the sysadmin has access to the machine at a level that they can backup anything but the settings. But since this is a search appliance they should be able to restore the box and import their settings and have it reindex their network.HotdogIT - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
"In closing, we'd like to thank Peter Griffin of Google, who helped us out a great deal while exploring the Mini's features."Peter. Griffin.
Winnar!