Google beefs up Mini search appliance for SMBs

Google's Mini search appliance for small and midsize businesses has grown a
new set of capabilities for crawling and categorizing documents, the company
announced in a blog post Tuesday.

"Almost all employees store files on shared servers so other employees
can access them. The Mini is now able to securely crawl and serve these file
shares," says the post
by Cyrus Mistry, enterprise product manager.

The revision also introduces document "biasing," the practice of
ranking the importance of related or similar pieces of information.

"Many customers have told us that they want to tell us which documents
are more valuable within their own companies -- for instance, published marketing
collateral is more authoritative than the first draft," Mistry wrote. "Source
biasing enables users to give us URL patterns and tell us if they should be
weighted higher or lower."

The Mini now also enables users to rank documents based on their age.

Finally, Google has boosted the Mini's international reach, adding support
for Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish in its help files
and administrative interfaces, according to the blog post.

However, the posting does not list any increase in the product's scalability.
It can index up to 300,000 documents, compared to its stablemate, the Google
Search Appliance, which is geared for larger enterprises and can handle up to
30 million documents.

The announcement of new features stands in contrast to a recent rumor, reported
by TechCrunch, that the company planned to stop selling the product and launch
a new hosted search site.

Both IBM and Microsoft offer free, entry-level search products that compete
with the Mini. Pricing for the Mini begins at about US$3,000, including two
years of support and the necessary hardware.

A Google spokesperson did not respond directly to a query about the TechCrunch
rumor, but said the company's "commitment to the Google Mini as the search
solution for small to medium-sized businesses and smaller departments of large
corporations is evidenced by this announcement."

The new features were prompted by customer requests and market demand, the
spokesperson said.

While the capabilities are "not groundbreaking," and high-end systems
have had them for years, they "do increase the functionality of base levels
of search," said Guy Creese, an analyst
with Burton Group, via e-mail.

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