Search Appliance Phones Home?

[Brett_Tabke]

Does the Google Search box phone home at any time?

[cabbie]

Does a tree falling in an abandoned forest make a sound?
:)

[plumsauce]

put it behind a logging firewall and find out

[EliteWeb]

Send me a unit Brett ill do some testing for you ;)

[mack]

It says it has free software updates for a year, I guess it must send version and build data to G in order to receive patches.

No idea about search data etc though.

Mack.

[bakedjake]

If it did, it would be a damned interesting form of PFI, now wouldn't it?

Added: It has two modes from what I understand - one where it can phone home, and one where it remains disconnected.

[graywolf]

Does a tree falling in an abandoned forest make a sound?

Off topic, but yet it does. I'll make the following anology to prove my viewpoint, does a light on a timer go on if nobody is there to see it? If you check your electric bill at the end of the month I bet you'll agree.

And the egg comes before the chicken. How do I know? There were eggs long before there were chickens (think dinosaurs)

[Brett_Tabke]

> interesting form of PFI

Tis the point we are trying to determine if it is worth the out lay for essentially what is a $30k peice of software with a a boxed pc thrown in as a perk.

[Shak]

If it did, it would be a damned interesting form of PFI, now wouldn't it?

heard a similar question at SES London, and Matt Cutts from Google said the answer was NO in relation to the PFI if I remember correctly.

unless things have changed, however a very interesting way of looking at things, especially when it came down to writing PFI revenue as enterprise search methinks

who knows

Shak

[ogletree]

I have a friend at IBM that have a few of them. As far a phoneing home you don't have to have it do that. You can lock it behind a firewall. It does get updates but it is like MS update you can have it done manualy. As far as searches it does not phone home at all. It is private. Several points he made were that you really need to throttle it down it will flood your network spidering. He found that putting it on a 10Mb half duplex switch did the trick. They do work for states so it searches tons of webservers. He said that they had a problem with it not following links in iframes. He also was told by G that they keep it about 6 months behind the real algo. You can see it at work at www.az.gov

Also it is not just a boxed PC it is a one U rack monted server. You do not have any access to the server. It is all managed by web forms.

[edited by: ogletree at 6:29 pm (utc) on June 30, 2004]

[bakedjake]

They state that it does phone home at some point:

Remote Diagnostics

Simplify maintenance through optional remote diagnostics by Google support

From: [google.com...]

If they were crawling publically available content, why wouldn't they phone home? Meaning, what negatives are there to phoning home?

I know of a reseller of these things, I'll try to get more info.