Google Mini

How the Google Mini search appliance benefits your business

As anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows, a fruitless search for a single missing document can paralyse progress for hours as ongoing operations grind to a halt. Knowledge workers need to search their corporate network to get work done, and solutions must be simple for employees to use and fast for administrators to deploy. Quick access to information is equally important on public websites as consumers have grown accustomed to web search engines that return relevant results instantaneously. This directly impacts your profitability because 80% of visitors will leave a site if dissatisfied with the search experience.

Enterprise search solutions have typically been expensive and complicated, but the Google Mini makes search technology affordable and easy for small businesses. It works with more than 220 different file types – including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Illustrator – and indexes and searches up to 300,000 publicly posted or internal documents stored on servers, file shares, or shared network drives.

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Getting search results on your internal or public website is as easy as using Google to get quality search results on the Internet. And you’ll get them with the split-second speed and pinpoint accuracy you’ve come to expect from Google. The Google Mini delivers results in the form of page summaries, with the query terms highlighted. So website visitors can instantly find the information they’re looking for, and internal workgroups can instantly access the information they need to complete their tasks. Unlike high-maintenance systems that require frequent tweaking and recalibrating and overwhelm systems administrators with constant demands for attention, the Google Mini doesn’t need a tech support baby-sitter. You simply plug it in, configure it, and let it run. The Google Mini does the rest, freeing tech support personnel to fulfil their primary task – supporting their users.

Phenomenal price-performance value

The Google Mini is surprisingly affordable, and delivers outstanding price-performance value. There’s nothing bare-bones about this deal, either. And Google makes it easy to upgrade from one version to the next, ensuring that the Mini can grow with your organisation. Once deployed, the swift responsiveness of Google’s support professionals will help you keep a lid on your internal IT costs.

The Google Mini pays for itself

One often overlooked aspect of search is return on investment (ROI). For intranets, the benefits are obvious. Thanks to Google search technology, your people will spend less time hunting for information and more time making productive use of it. The benefits for public websites are equally clear. When new prospects and customers are able to find what they’re looking for – or what you’d like them to find – quickly and easily, they tend to come back more often, and stay longer. And whether your revenues are based on online sales or advertising or both, you’ll appreciate the uptick in profitability. Bottom line: The Google Mini is one of the most rewarding little investments you can make. The Google Mini’s cutting-edge technology, ease of use and outstanding value helps end users, administrators and business owners achieve their search goals.

End Users

It’s all about the search: There’s a reason why Google is the undisputed leader when it comes to search: Google search quality. The same great search that you find on Google.com has been optimized for use on public websites and intranets, and it delivers relevant search results at record speed. The Mini’s OneBox API also allows you to search in real-time across databases, CRM, content management systems, and more.

Familiar interface: A key measure of a search solution’s effectiveness is how frequently it’s actually used. And by providing the same familiar user interface and functionality as Google.com, the Google Mini eliminates the need for training and increases user adoption. Organisations that want to weave Google Mini functionality into their site design can give their sites a “mini” make-over using a built-in wizard interface. Or they can go for a full facelift, using the Google Mini’s available XML feed.

Integrate with document security systems: The Mini can crawl and serve search results for sites protected by HTTP Basic and NTLM v1 and v2 security and can integrate with your LDAP system. Both authentication and authorisation occur at serve time, so individual users see only the results they have clearance to access.

Boosting user productivity: Productivity-enhancing extras include a self-learning smart spell checker, the ability to view documents in HTML (instead of having to download the required plug-ins) and accessing cached versions of documents – even if the documents themselves are offline.

Administrators

True plug-and-play installation: As a tightly integrated hardware and software solution, the Google Mini requires no additional components or tinkering to get started. The initial configuration was streamlined so you can complete it in as little as a half-hour.

No manual document tagging or search customization required: Google believes the technology itself should do the heavy lifting – not you, the administrator. To that end, Google’s search relevance technology automatically considers over 100 different factors when determining search results, eliminating the need for costly and confusing manual search customisation.

Minimal ongoing administration: Once configured, the Google Mini can be set to crawl and index content at regular intervals, leaving you time for that tropical vacation you’ve always meant to take. However, if you need to make any changes or want to check in while away, the Google Mini’s web-interface gives you full remote access to all administrator functionality.

Insight into user search behaviour: Besides providing a great search experience, the Google Mini can also improve your site. The Google Mini generates reports on whatever page errors and broken links it finds in your site, allowing you to quickly fix things and improve overall site usability. It also captures your organization’s zeitgeist, providing reports on the most frequent search terms that you can use to identify your users’ hot button issues. And that in turn helps you improve site navigation and plan marketing initiatives.

Business owners

Search R&D Leaders: Google is recognized as the global leader in innovative search technology. We invest more in search research and development than any other company, and we’re known for standing by our products and customers.

Immediate ROI: The Google Mini’s combination of plug-and-play installation and familiar user interface means your organisation will realize the benefits of Google search in record time.