First launched in 2002, the Google Search Appliance is a rack-mounted unit designed to crawl and index intranet pages for enterprise search. Combined with OS-level integration points such as the Google Deskbar, the appliance is the bridge between an index of your PC hard drive and the internet. While Google has not yet announced an integration into the PC level index space, several third party vendors have announced the ability to add adaptive crawl technologies integrated with Microsoft Windows and Office. Most notable is Lookout which even looks like a Google knock-off.
The GB-1001 is a rack-mounted two-unit (2U) appliance that can be licensed to search up to 1.5 million documents at a rate of 300 queries per minute.
Our entry level license indexes up to 150,000 documents and costs $32,000 for a two-year license with hardware, software and technical support all included. Pricing scales upwards based on the number of documents.
June’s Greenhouse Associates newsletter puts revenues of the Google Search Appliance at $20 million.
http://www.greenhousegrows.com/publications/06-2004/article1.html