Google Mini - Make searching for company's intranet easier

Google search?...Mention this word and you will get a response, Yes, I know google search, I have been using google search for years.

Almost every people that knows how to use internet has and at least try to use Google search engine.

Eventhough there are a lot of other search engine, like Yahoo and MSN, but google is still the number 1 search engine at this time.
For some statistics recently published, these are the top 3 search engines:
1. Google - 48.2%
2. Yahoo - 22.2%
3. MSN - 11%
4. Others - 18.6%

Google captured 48.2% of the market. Not bad right.

Dont you wish that your Company's "intranet" website is easy to be searched as well? I have been working with big companies in the past, and *sigh*, to find some document in the intranet, its like a "maze". It can took 10-30 minutes just to find some old documents in the intranet, and the most annoying part, the website keep changing, and so the link, they keep trying to update the face of the site, and the old link doesnt work. Arrgghhhh, sometimes it frustates me to when searching for documents.

Not anymore now :), Google have a solution for the companies, they call their product "Google Mini" and "Google Search Entreprise". I will just focus on Google mini, since I like this name.
Google mini is a hardware device with "Google" software inside.

From the google website, these are the description:
"The Google Mini is a hardware-software solution designed to help your organization make the most of its digital assets by delivering the power and productivity of Google search across your documents and websites – quickly,easily and affordably. "

Nice, if there is one thing that I like about google search, is no training needed.
Almost everybody has already known how to use google search.

So what the companies needs to do to:
1. Buy Google Mini
2. Configure the google mini to point to your company website. The configuration is using web based.
3. Let it "crawl" to the companies website, it will index all the documents that it found i.e. MS Word, Text File, HTML File, PDF File, etc.
4. Put some link in the company Webpage: to do searching, but its actually pointing to google mini
5. Done. you can find all the documents easily with the same user interface as the normal google website.

Next time when you need to find document related to "Annual Increment" you will just need to spend minutes to look for the document since google's has already make your life easier.

So How much is it?
Google Mini comes with a different flavour depends on how big is your company's intranet website:
1. 50,000 Documents - US$ 1995
2. 100,000 Documents - US$ 2995
3. 200,000 Documents - US$5995
4. 300,000 Documents - US$ 8995
5. more than 300,000 Documents -> use the google entreprise, and I dont know the price :P.

Not cheap :), but if the company is big, to buy this product and with the benefit of
a. improve the performance and response time ,
b. cut down employee time to search for document, it worth it.
c. cut down employee training

I believe its worth it.

Lets give some example:
1. For an employee to come out with a search engine program itself to index the company's intranet document, it will take about 2 months. Assume the salary of the employee is about 3000 USD.
2 months = 6000 USD.
How about bug of the progam? Amount of time for testing, number of users that involves in the testing....ouchhh.........At the end, it will easily above >15,000 USD :-) and keep increasing.

But with this google mini, 1 time buy, and it will solve all the pains, you know the software works. since you have been using google every day :).

And for all that maters, within the 1st year, if anything spoilt with the hardware and software, google will replace it. And after the 1st year, its up to the company whether they want to get the support or stick with the current hardware and software without any additional charge.

Noted: I am not a google employee :-)

More Info: http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/


cya.