Google unveils new search appliances for businesses

Corporate IT Update, Jan 13, 2006

CORPORATE IT UPDATE-(C)1995-2006 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Details of two new, higher-capacity applications which enable searches for documents within a business, have been unveiled by search engine company Google Inc.

Google has introduced three Google 'Mini' search appliances, which combine hardware and software, suitable for use by small to mid-sized companies. These include systems that can find up to 200,000 internal documents and a 300,000 document search system, costing USD5,995 and USD8,995 respectively.

The search appliances can be used to cull a broad range of documents within an organisation, or to search through documents on a company's web site, for external customer use. The new devices work in the same way as Google's Mini search appliance which is able to search 100,000 documents, costs USD2,995 and was introduced a year ago.

In addition, Google has introduced a search appliance which is suitable for government organisations and large businesses and costs from USD30,000 up to USD600,000 for the higher capacity search systems.

IDC, a market research company, said the 'enterprise search market', which searches within an organisation rather than on the public Internet was worth around USD750m in 2004 and is expected to have exceeded sales of USD900m in 2005.

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