Friday, January 14, 2005

Google on Thursday began selling the Google Mini, a low-priced box for corporate intranet search.

With the new product, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company hopes to broaden its search-appliance business to cater to smaller businesses with fewer documents and tighter budgets. The blue box, which plugs into a corporate intranet and searches up to 50,000 documents, was launched Thursday at Google.com for $4,995.

By comparison, Google's seminal search appliance, introduced in 2002, starts at more than $30,000. It searches 100,000 documents or more.

In addition, the company will introduce an upgrade to its larger search appliance that will give customers new security controls, among other features.News.com