Little Blue Box: Big Business Tech for Everyone

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing, Google Enterprise

Just two years ago we made enterprise search technology accessible to small business when we released the Google Mini, and it was only last April that we revamped the Mini with a new design and more powerful features. And yet, we were convinced that we could deliver even more technology and a better experience to our users.

Today we're pleased to announce some Mini innovations that mean large improvements for the Mini's use on your intranet or public website. We've also added features that will let you search the business applications across your enterprise for an affordable price - big business power in the same Mini package.

The most frequent request we heard from our intranet users was the ability to search across various data sources that weren't websites. We previously introduced a feature called OneBox for Enterprise in the Google Search Appliance, and now our engineers have squeezed it into the Mini's small but powerful package. OneBox allows users to search across various systems -- Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Cognos to name just a few -- all from the same search box. Results are delivered in real time.

We also introduced the notion of document-level security into the search results. 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. This enables both authentication and authorization at serve time, so you can make sure individual users see only the results they have clearance to access.

For those customers who use the Mini on public websites, we integrated with Google's webmaster tools. A new administrative interface makes it simple to add Google Analytics tracking code to your search pages, so you can better understand how visitors search your website. And to help Google.com more accurately index your public website, the Mini auto-generates a Sitemap file that helps us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.

Existing customers can upgrade their Google Minis through our support website. If you don't already have a Mini, check it out.