Google Mini Administrator Features

A combined hardware and software search appliance, the Google Mini is a 1U rack mountable server that comes with all the horsepower you need to add Google search to your organization’s website or intranet. It can index up to 100,000 documents in over 220 different file formats and any language, and once up and running, the Google Mini serves up to 60 search queries per minute.

Learn how to set up and administer the Google Mini

• Installation, Integration & Deployment
• Accessing Your Content
• The Initial Crawl
• Advanced Features
• Reporting
• Customer Support
• Technical Specs

The Google Mini is easy to install and even easier to maintain. You can usually install and configure the Google Mini in less than an hour.

The Google Mini fits easily into any standard data center rack. After setting it up in your data center, you’ll connect it to your network with an Ethernet cable, provide basic network settings – for example, an IP address – and then configure and manage it through an intuitive web-based interface.

Because the Mini accesses content over your internal network, there’s no need to connect it directly to a server and no limit on the number of servers it can crawl.

Once the Google Mini is connected to your network, the first step is to provide access to your content. The Google Mini can crawl over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents, and automatically detects more than 28 languages.

To be crawled by the Google Mini, documents need to be web-enabled (i.e., accessible by HTTP or HTTPS protocol). The Google Mini accesses documents much the same way as a user with a web browser does. See the Initial Crawl description for more info on accessing documents in file shares and content management systems.

The Google Mini uses your document’s inherent link structure to find all the files on your network, so administrators don’t have to enter individual document locations, and publishers don’t have to change the way they publish documents. You might be surprised by how much stuff the Mini finds on your network!

Once the Google Mini is connected to your network, the first step is to provide access to your content. Simply enter a few starting points – URLs, or document locations – and the Mini will automatically find and scan all your documents (you can also define areas of your site that you don’t want the Google Mini to crawl as easily as you enter starting URLs). The length of time required for the initial crawl depends on various factors – the number of documents, size of documents and speed of your servers, etc. – but the Mini should be able crawl all your content in just a few hours.

Administrators can allow the Google Mini to crawl content located in file shares and content management systems by web-enabling the content. The easiest way to web-enable a file share is to install Microsoft IIS or Apache Web Server on the content’s server. Similarly, most content management systems (for example, Microsoft SharePoint) include an option to display content in a web-enabled format.

With the Google Mini’s automated crawling feature, administrators can schedule subsequent crawls to run at their convenience.

Once it’s up and running, the Google Mini offers a variety of customization options.

• Subcollections: Suppose you want your customer support team to be able to search a knowledge base and simultaneously let your marketing team search through product presentations. Or suppose you want to run your public site search and your intranet search off of one Google Mini. You can use subcollections to create sections of your index for particular sets of users. Each subcollection will have a separate URL and search interface.
  
• Integrate search results into your site’s look and feel: The Google Mini lets you give your search results page any look and feel you desire by providing a web-based wizard interface to make cosmetic changes. If you want to further integrate the search interface into your site, you can upload an XSLT style sheet. For the ultimate in customization, you can get search results in XML and use them in your site or intranet in a variety of contexts.
  
• KeyMatch: The Google Mini lets you promote links to the top of your search results, much like the ads you often see on Google.com results pages. This lets you promote new products on your public website, or point employees to important documents on your intranet.
  
• Synonyms: Are you finding that customers can’t find laptop computers on your website because you call them “notebook computers”? The Google Mini lets you create synonyms to associate relevant words, so that when a user searches for “laptop,” they’ll learn they should also try “notebook computer.”
  
• Crawl Secure Web Servers: The Google Mini can crawl secure web servers using NTLM authentication. To ensure that only certain users can see these pages, you can use a proxy server to password-protect access.
  
• Display key attributes of search results: Suppose you want to display the author of a document or a product’s price and picture when it appears on your search results pages? The Google Mini lets you do this through meta tags which you can put in the “head” of your web pages.
  
• Filter results through meta-tags: What if you want to show products in a certain category when your users search your product pages? The Google Mini allows you to filter results to only show documents whose meta tags have specific values.
  
• Excluding pages from the search index: The Google Mini let you specify certain pages or types of pages that you want to keep out of your search index. These can be exact URLs, or you can use regular expressions to determine patterns of URLs to exclude (for example, all images or all log files).

The Google Mini’s extensive reporting capability lets you know how your end users are using search. The Google Mini’s summary reports (for date ranges that you specify) include:

• Total number of searches and unique queries
• Number of searches on a particular day
• Average number of searches at different hours of the day
• Top 100 keywords and queries

In addition, when the Mini crawls your website or intranet, it reports back which URLs it included in its index and any errors that it encountered (e.g., broken links).

Finally, the Google Mini gives you access to its exhaustive query logs so you can see what queries were entered at what times.

One year of full customer support and hardware replacement coverage is included in the Google Mini’s price and you have the option to buy a second year of support. With this support package, we provide:

• 24/7 access to our customer support site with documentation, FAQs, software updates, and user forums
• Full-service email support for every aspect of the Google Mini. That means you have access to information and assistance from experts on the hardware, the software, and even the operating system
• Guaranteed replacements in the case of any hardware failure

• Form factor: 1U rack mountable server
• Dimensions: 1.75”x19”x25.13”
• Weight: 26 pounds
• Voltage: 90V-250V
• Electrical Frequency: 47-63Hz
• Max input line current: 6 amps @ 120 V, 3 amps at 240 volts
• Thermal requirement: 515 BTU/hour
• Environmental requirements: 50-86 degrees Fahrenheit