The Google Mini - A look at Google's entry-level search appliance
by Liz van Dijk on December 21, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
... And downsides
Though the Google Mini package is undoubtedly high in quality, we can't claim it's completely flawless. As we hinted previously, one of the first real limitations we ran into had to do with security. On both fileservers and webservers, the Mini is currently rather limited in properly handling secured content. The fact that the Google Search Appliance offers many of these capabilities isn't much consolation, because the price jump will be too large for smaller companies to afford, requiring them to either skip the crawling of their secure documents, or else find other solutions.
Our own internal wiki system is a good illustration of this problem. It contains information that's confidential to our lab, so we require users to authenticate before viewing any information. Since this system uses cookie-based authentication, the Mini was unable to crawl any of our wiki pages, which was actually the primary use we had in mind for it.
The Mini's inability to enforce authentication for our samba shares created another obvious problem for our lab, where access to nearly every file would ordinarily require authentication. Having the Mini crawl our fileserver left our documents open for anyone to see, and since the Mini serves the results as direct download links, our own safety measures were rendered ineffective .
Using the Mini to index our fileserver made our secured content downloadable to everyone with access to the Mini.
Luckily, this did not cause too much trouble in our case, since our intranet is only accessible to a limited group of users, but it is still a factor to keep in mind when considering a Mini. Some changes to existing security systems may be necessary to keep sensitive content safe.
The lack of control over the Mini itself also bothered us.. Not only are we completely locked out of the OS itself, but monitoring the system's status is out of the question. Though the administration panel does give us a "System status" page, the info provided here is very sparse, and might as well not have been there at all. We hope Google will implement more detailed monitoring here in the future.
A screenshot containing the full package of the Mini's monitoring tools.
Lastly, we would also appreciate an easier overview of the crawler, and more direct control of it. At this point, any directions it can be given seem to be put into a priority queue of sorts, which does get crawled first, but isn't really clear, and gives you no real feedback on the results of your commands. This may cause some confusion as to whether your commands are really being handled at all, and made us wish we could actually see what the crawler was doing in real time. Granted, there are actually some reporting options available, but we found them rather lacking, and using the wonderful Google Analytics system really puts the Mini's built-in reporting options to shame.
In general, we feel that there's still a lot of room for improvement in the Mini's management console, both in usability and general provision of information. We hope that Google looks into these issues when they release their next update for the machine.
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Genx87 - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link
The lack of security takes this out of an serious contention for a small or medium size business who can afford this device. The cost takes it out of the contention for business's who are small enough to not care about security as much.Having worked for a small business ~30 people. There is no way they would authorize me to spend that kind of cash on a device that indexes our documents. At my current employer which is ~200 people we would have the budget, but the lack of security will put the smackdown on it.
bfoster68 - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
just to clear something up. You don't implement a raided solution as a form of backup. You implement it for fault tolerance so that if a drive fails your system stays up. I don't know what market segment google planned for this appliance but my company would require a fault tolerance solution providing 4 9's uptime.my guess is this appliance is for the small business segment and the hardware was designed with this in mind.
Any solution for a fortune 500 company would require at a minimum dual redundant power supplies and a hardware based, hot swapable raid configuration, Error corrrecting ram and many other features.
I am not very familiar with this product so please feel free to correct any inaccuracies.
Just my two cents.
Bill
dblevitan - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Has anyone tried taking out the hard drive, connecting it to another computer, and looking at what's on it? I'm sure it can't be too hard to see what's actually running on the computer.n0nsense - Sunday, December 23, 2007 - link
You'll probably find Linux based system inside running MySQL and the engine :)For the rest, the prescot CPU and 1 HD used because they cost less.
When you save 100$ on each box, it is 100,000$ for 1000 boxes :)
Lizz - Saturday, December 22, 2007 - link
Getting inside the Mini is probably not impossible, and we considered quite a bunch of methods, simply out of curiosity.However, the focus of this review is to give our readers a look at what the Mini actually offers those interested in purchasing one, so we decided not to give it too much focus. :)
drothgery - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
At least on my employer's Google mini, I found that I could add cookies to the request header.andyleung - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
For green purpose, maybe google will do the magic of using AMD Geode or VIA CPU that consumes no more than 5W of power in peak time and still process 250 queries per second. Good job google, I am looking forward to seeing you doing this one day.Taft12 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
Agreed, especially given the light load required for this appliance's purpose. In the meantime, if they must use a chip single-core desktop chip, why not one of the Core 2-based Celerons?Great review! I knew it would get bogged down in a hardware discussion though given the audience here.
PBMax - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
This device is an appliance. It is not a "computer" in the traditional sense of a multipurpose server. I had to fight that idea when my previous company went into the appliance business. When you buy an appliance you buy what it can do and not how it does it. They sell these systems as 50,000 document and 300,000 document systems. So that is the benchmark for performance. As for RAID. This is an entry level system and as such is stripped down. I'm sure the higher end models support RAID. I went to a Google Enterprise seminar and they were talking about search appliances from the Mini to the OneBox and prices ranged from $1500 to over a million. Also I don't think the sysadmin has access to the machine at a level that they can backup anything but the settings. But since this is a search appliance they should be able to restore the box and import their settings and have it reindex their network.HotdogIT - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link
"In closing, we'd like to thank Peter Griffin of Google, who helped us out a great deal while exploring the Mini's features."Peter. Griffin.
Winnar!