Administrator Features
A combined hardware and software search appliance,
the Google Mini is a 1U rack mountable server that comes with all
the horsepower you need to add Google search to your organization’s
website or intranet. It can index up to 100,000 documents in over
220 different file formats and any language, and once up and running,
the Google Mini serves up to 60 search queries per minute.
Learn how to set up and administer the Google
Mini
The Google Mini is easy to install and even easier
to maintain. You can usually install and configure the Google
Mini in less than an hour.
The Google Mini fits easily into any standard
data center rack. After setting it up in your data center, you’ll connect it
to your network with an Ethernet cable, provide basic network settings – for
example, an IP address – and then configure and manage
it through an intuitive web-based interface.
Because the Mini accesses content over your internal
network, there’s
no need to connect it directly to a server and no limit on the
number of servers it can crawl.
Once the Google Mini is connected to your network,
the first step is to provide access to your content. The Google
Mini can crawl over 220 different
file formats, including HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents,
and automatically detects more than 28 languages.
To be crawled by the Google Mini, documents need
to be web-enabled (i.e., accessible by HTTP or HTTPS protocol).
The Google Mini accesses documents much the same way as a user
with a web browser does.
See the Initial Crawl description for more
info on accessing documents in file shares and content management systems.
The Google Mini uses your document’s inherent link structure
to find all the files on your network, so administrators don’t
have to enter individual document locations, and publishers don’t
have to change the way they publish documents. You might be surprised
by how much stuff the Mini finds on your network!
Once the Google Mini is connected to your network,
the first step is to provide access to your content. Simply enter
a few starting points – URLs, or document locations – and
the Mini will automatically find and scan all your documents
(you can also define areas of your site that you don’t
want the Google Mini to crawl as easily as you enter starting
URLs). The length of time required for the initial crawl depends
on various factors – the number of documents, size of documents
and speed of your servers, etc. – but the Mini should be
able crawl all your content in just a few hours.
Administrators can allow the Google Mini to
crawl content located in file shares and content management systems
by web-enabling the content. The easiest way to web-enable a
file share is to install Microsoft IIS or Apache Web Server on
the content’s server. Similarly, most content
management systems (for example, Microsoft SharePoint) include
an option to display content in a web-enabled format.
With the Google Mini’s automated crawling
feature, administrators can schedule subsequent crawls to run at
their convenience.
Once it’s up and running,
the Google Mini offers a variety of customization options.
- Subcollections: Suppose
you want your customer support team to be able to search a
knowledge base and simultaneously let your marketing team search
through product presentations. Or suppose you want to run your
public site search and your intranet search
off of one Google Mini. You can use subcollections to create
sections of your index for particular sets of users. Each subcollection
will have a separate URL and search interface.
- Integrate search results into your
site’s look and feel: The
Google Mini lets you give your search results page any look
and feel you desire by providing a web-based wizard interface
to make cosmetic changes. If you want to further integrate
the search interface into your site, you can upload an XSLT
style sheet. For the ultimate in customization, you can
get search results in XML and use them in your site or intranet
in a variety of contexts.
- KeyMatch: The Google Mini lets you promote
links to the top of your search results, much like the ads
you often see on Google.com results pages. This lets you promote
new products on your public website, or point employees to
important documents on your intranet.
- Synonyms: Are you finding that customers
can’t find laptop computers on your website because you
call them “notebook computers”? The Google
Mini lets you create synonyms to associate relevant words,
so that when a user searches for “laptop,” they’ll
learn they should also try “notebook computer.”
- Crawl Secure Web Servers: The
Google Mini can crawl secure web servers using NTLM authentication.
To ensure that only certain users can see these pages, you
can use a proxy server to password-protect access.
- Display key attributes of search
results: Suppose you want to display the
author of a document or a product’s price and picture
when it appears on your search results pages? The Google
Mini lets you do this through meta tags which you can put
in the “head” of your web pages.
- Filter results through meta-tags: What
if you want to show products in a certain category when your
users search your product pages? The Google Mini allows you
to filter
results to only show documents whose meta tags have specific
values.
- Excluding pages from the search index: The
Google Mini let you specify certain pages or types of pages
that you want to keep out of your search index. These can be
exact URLs, or you can use regular expressions to determine
patterns of URLs to exclude (for example, all images or all
log files).
The Google Mini’s extensive
reporting capability lets you know how your end users are using
search. The Google Mini’s summary reports (for date ranges
that you specify) include:
- Total number of searches and unique
queries
- Number of searches on a particular day
- Average number of searches at different
hours of the day
- Top 100 keywords and queries
In addition, when the Mini crawls your website
or intranet, it reports back which URLs it included in its index
and any errors that it encountered (e.g., broken links).
Finally, the Google Mini gives you access to
its exhaustive query logs so you can see what queries were entered
at what times.
One year of full customer
support and hardware replacement coverage is included in the
Google Mini’s $2,995 price, and you
buy a second year of support for $995. With this support package,
we provide:
- 24/7 access to our customer support
site with documentation, FAQs, software updates, and user forums
- Full-service email support for every
aspect of the Google Mini. That means you have access to information
and assistance from experts on the hardware, the software,
and even the operating system
- Guaranteed replacements in the case
of any hardware failure
For more details, see http://www.google.com/enterprise/support.html
- Form factor: 1U rack mountable server
- Dimensions: 1.75”x19”x25.13”
- Weight: 26 pounds
- Voltage: 90V-250V
- Electrical Frequency: 47-63Hz
- Max input line current: 6 amps @ 120 V, 3 amps at 240
volts
- Thermal requirement: 515 BTU/hour
- Environmental requirements: 50-86 degrees Fahrenheit
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