Google's Mini
Just ran across this today: the Google Mini.
Meet the Google Mini. Designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make the most of their digital assets, the Mini is a hardware and software search appliance that delivers the power and productivity of Google search across your organization’s documents and websites.
The Google Mini:
- Indexes and searches up to 50,000 documents.
- Works with over 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office.
- Can be set up in under an hour and requires minimal ongoing administration.
- Costs $4,995 for all hardware and software, including a year of support and hardware replacement coverage.
This has some interesting implications for SharePoint. While it isn't as feature rich as SharePoint, it is definately a competitor in the information aggregation space.
Update: Sahil Malik asks how this relates to SharePoint. Perhaps I should have clarified and said SharePoint Portal Server. In order to see the relation take a look at Microsoft's Top 10 Benefits of SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
Find and reuse timely and relevant information from systems and reports, and quickly locate and access documents, projects, and best practices by searching or browsing—all through the portal.
...
The industry-leading search technology in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables you to locate files, project plans, and best practices in file shares, Web sites, Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, Lotus Notes, Windows SharePoint Services sites, and databases instead of re-creating the wheel.
Now I'm not saying that the Google Mini is a direct competitor to SharePoint since SP offers much more than search. However, when it comes to information aggregation the Google Mini is clearly a competitor. I've no idea if it can search Lotus Notes or Exchange, but you could probably figure out a way to make it work.