Google Now Has Gaggle Of Minis

One of the new Mini appliances promises to search up to 200,000 documents for just under $6,000 and another up to 300,000 documents for just under $9,000.

The latest appliances come as Mountain View, Calif.-based Google celebrates the original Mini's first birthday. The original Intel-based appliance searched up to 100,000 documents for about $3,000.

"We still see a large, underserved market [in small and midsize companies],” said Rajen Sheth, product manager for Google's Enterprise Division. “We hear all the time about intranets where they now discover hundreds of thousands of documents. With this release, we'll bring the same ease of use to those companies."

The new Minis will sell direct, but Google now has dozens of partners working on bringing Google search to internal documents that it currently doesn&'t reach. The new appliances could expand the potential customer universe for those partners.

Already the search leader on the Web, Google is now racing to entrench its search technology in corporate intranets. It&'s probably no accident that some of the partners Google recruited have expertise in Microsoft SharePoint as well as in legacy big-iron applications, all of which had so far been beyond the tentacles of Google Search.

Microsoft is likewise trying to capitalize on internal searches and catch up to Google on the Web.