Google makes Mini effort to woo SMES

Google has doubled the capacity and lowered the price of its lowest-end search appliance, the company said.

The Google Mini, which is designed for small and midsize businesses, can now index up to 100,000 documents or unique URLs — double its previous volume. The company also reduced the price to $2,995 from $4,995 when the product first came out in January.

Despite being best known for its public search engine, the company has also been plugging away at corporate-focused search. To that end, the company sells search appliances, which combine hardware and software to index documents on a company's internal or external websites. The new Google Mini's greater capacity and lower price are designed to make the entry-level search appliance more attractive to smaller businesses.

By indexing corporate documents and URLS using its search appliances, Google said, corporate websites can let people search for documents just as they do when using Google.com to search the web. The Google Mini will offer searchers suggestions on spelling, for example, just as Google.com does.

"Content is dramatically increasing everywhere and it's no longer limited to documents, spreadsheets and presentations," Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business unit, said in a statement. "With more web pages, weblogs, wikis and other content, businesses of every size are having a hard time keeping track of it all."

On Wednesday, the company also updated its Google Search Appliance for larger businesses. The entry-level version of its Google Search Appliance, the GB-1001, can now index 500,000 documents, up from 100,000, and will sell for $30,000, including two years of support, the company said.

Its highest-end search appliance for large businesses can index 15 million documents, the company said.