Review: Google Mini 2 search device

Google it yourself with the new Mini

Mini by name but not by nature, the Google Mini 2 is a self-contained appliance that allows small businesses to use Google’s search technology on their own intranet and public websites. The latest implementation is about half the size of the original, yet more powerful with new indexing and reporting features plus facilities to include network shares in the process.

The Google Mini 2 looks like a bright blue rackmount server, which is exactly what it is. The server hardware is from Supermicro and it runs an implementation of Red Hat Linux. More than that, however, is hard to establish as Google is reluctant to reveal what’s inside, and tamper-proof screws mean you can’t open it up without invalidating the warranty.

But the exact specification isn’t important. Depending on how it’s licensed, the same device can index anything from 50,000 to 300,000 documents and, should it ever go wrong, Google will simply swap it. It does, however, cost £695 ex Vat to extend that protection beyond the first year, and owners of the original Mini will need to shell out for a new device to get the updated software.

Installation takes about 10 minutes. A yellow cable is supplied to connect to the local network, and an orange crossover cable for initial setup. After installation you can unplug the orange lead and manage the appliance from any PC on the network. A built-in firewall stops any other access apart from searches, with the Linux operating system tightly locked down for extra security.

Putting it to work is pretty straightforward too. The management interface has been reworked to make it easier to follow, and all you really need to do is to specify the URLs to search, then sit back as the Mini 2 crawls through the data and builds an index. This can take anything from a few minutes to several hours depending on the number of documents.

Some 220 files types can be handled including Microsoft Office documents and Pdf files as well as ordinary HTML pages. And you don’t have to sit around waiting for it all to happen. A scheduler helps automate the process and new facilities automatically increase the frequency of crawls on servers subject to lots of changes.

Unfortunately, including Windows shares in the indexing process isn’t as straightforward as claimed, requiring a lot of experimentation before we managed to get the syntax right. On the plus side, enhanced reporting tools help when it comes to troubleshooting and all the documentation is on the appliance.

The familiar Google interface is used to search the indexes, with a certain amount of basic customisation possible and a built-in XSLT editor to enable developers to integrate the search engine into their applications and websites.

Search results are returned within seconds with the usual options to order the results by relevance or index date. You can also configure the software to suggest synonyms and perform keyword matching with associated links at the top of the page.

On the downside, some of the more advanced features found on Google’s enterprise appliances aren’t available. The only way to stop sensitive documents being included, for example, is to protect them behind a proxy server. But then the enterprise devices can be hugely expensive while the Google Mini 2 is both affordable and much simpler to deploy.