Google Search Appliance

» see google.com/enterprise/search as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the google search appliance was the kind of product you only met if your job involved a server room. i did not see one in person at the time, by then i had no enterprise role and the box was not a consumer object. google shipped its first gsa in february 2002 as a literal yellow 1u rack server, rebadged dell poweredge hardware running a hardened centos image. you bought it on a two-year contract and plugged it into your own data center, then pointed it at the intranet or the file share you needed to search.

the architecture is simple enough. the unit indexed up to about 10 million documents on the gb-7007 2u model and up to 30 million on the gb-9009 5u. in those days. later generations called g100 and g500 pushed the upper limit to roughly 100 million documents in a single chassis. anyway, the appliance ran google's own ranking software internally and exposed a search box to the company through a browser, so the people inside the firewall got something that felt like google.com but only saw their own files.

not closely. by the early 2010s the entire premise of buying a search server and plugging it into a closet had become a strange thing to do. enterprises were moving to saas. honestly the product made google look more like ibm than google for ten years and that contradiction had to resolve eventually.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the postmortem ~

on february 9 2016 google sent a confidential letter to its existing customers and resellers. still, the substance was that google would stop selling new appliances after 2016 and not renew any contract past 2018. fabasoft and mindbreeze were two of the channel partners that published the news within days. the register picked it up on february 10. the price of an existing gsa contract on the secondary market collapsed inside a quarter.

~ what it became ~

google steered customers to its cloud search product, which lived on google's servers and not inside the customer firewall. to be fair, this was actually the part that some regulated industries could not move to (more or less). banks and government tenants had bought the appliance specifically because the data never left the building. the cloud successor solved the wrong problem for them. by 2019 the boxes were either decommissioned or running unsupported.

~ the long tail ~

mindbreeze inspire absorbed most of the displaced customers who needed an on-premise box that looked and acted like the gsa. roughly. elastic and solr picked up the rest. the yellow chassis itself became collectible in a small way, you can still find decommissioned units on ebay listed as decoration for a server-room shelf. honestly, it is the cleanest example of a google product that was killed by another google product on the same roadmap.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »