Prices reduced on Google Search Appliance

[engine]

Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web search leader Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it has cut the price on licenses for its hardware that helps small and medium-sized businesses add search to their internal networks and public Web sites.

google cuts prices [today.reuters.com]

[mrfragger]

"The company also cut to $2,995 from $4,995 the license price on the Google Mini -- a search appliance for small businesses that was released in January. That license includes one year of support and allows holders to search up to 100,000 documents versus 50,000 documents previously."

Wow last time I called them about 2 years ago looking into getting one the cheapest was $20,000. Now it's down to $3,000.

[otc_cmnn]

Anyone out there own one?

I am realllly tempted but would like to hear some independent success stories.

jb

[paybacksa]

I wonder if the license leaves room for them to put ads into the search results? or mine the search activity?

With 1% of profits coming from this part of Google's business you have to wonder what the strategy is.

[vitaplease]

Well that's getting closer to becoming interesting for smaller companies.

Still, with Copernic we still can search our server data for free from local computers.

[tntpower]

Nice. It's on the right lane.

[conor]

I wanted to buy the first release for €20,000, but they wouldn't sell it to a non U.S company.

I was tempted last year to buy the Mini at $5,000, but was put off by it's limitation then of 50,000 documents ( we were above 30,000 at the time, and still growing )

At €3,000 for 100,000 documents I am a buyer ;)

[Captain]

We bought the Mini last week for 5K. We are installing it today.

Here is the email I received today >>

<snip>

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 1:46 pm (utc) on April 7, 2005]
[edit reason] no email excerpts. Please see tos item #9 [/edit]

[shri]

This brings it to the level of buying a new machine and putting nutch on it.

Definately going to investigate this -- I suspect they don't sell it internationally.

Can we pick up one at the Google Booth in New Orleans? :)

[tntpower]

3000 is really a nice price but I think G will cut additional 1000 dollars in the future and increase the file quote as well.

[HyperGeek]

What are the advantages of having this hardware? Are there positioning/indexing perks that comes with it?

[otc_cmnn]

From what I know there are no indexing 'perks'.

Though it does make experiementing with G's algo REALLY easy as you control when your pages are indexed and what they are compared to.

But what G is selling is the ability to apply the brains of their algo to your site instead of realying on hand rolled result such as

SELECT * FROM products WHERE products_name LIKE '%search-term%' ORDER BY arbitrary_guess

Apparantly the system learns as it goes, picks up algo updates, uses their known synonyms as well as allowing to add your own. Sounds sweet... and unltimately cheaper tahn writing and maintain your own.

Anyone point me to site successfully deployed or do I have to be my own gineau pig?