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.

Customers wouldn't have revolted if Google hadn't added the features, according
to Creese. "However, I do think it points to Google viewing the way to
win in this market as giving good value for the money," he said. "While
competitors are probably grinding their teeth, this is good news for the entire
search market, as competing solutions will have to [improve] their feature sets
as well."

The move falls in line with past practices, he added: "This is similar
to what Google has done with Web analytics. In the past, free or inexpensive
Web analytics [were] pretty bare-bones. However, Google Analytics has consistently
added features that mean the entry-level solution is now quite full-featured."

Stephen Arnold, a search analyst
who tracks Google closely, said the move shows the company has "confidence
that sophisticated features are solid enough for toaster customers."

However, it is unlikely that Google plans to boost the Mini's scalability,
because it wouldn't make business sense, according to Arnold.

"They never will," he said. "The logic of every box is that
it has a hard limit."

IDG News Service

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