Budget-line search appliance expanded to larger enterprises.

Search giant Google has upped the size and scope of its Google Mini document warehousing systems. 

Google Mini offers a preinstalled rack-mount search appliance that allows companies to catalogue and search large collections of documents inside the network.

The new systems start at US$1,995 for a 50,000 document capacity, while the largest model holds 300,000 documents and costs US$10,000.

Dave Girouard, vice president at Google Enterprise, claimed that the new systems fill a gap for medium-sized enterprises stuck between smaller low-end systems and more expensive high-end systems.

"As search becomes more critical to businesses of all sizes, Google continues to add even more sophisticated search features that, until now, had only been available to large businesses," he said.

The system features new security software allowing administrators to limit access to information on either a user or document level.

Google Mini also includes OneBox which unlocks information on enterprise applications from a series of vendors including Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com. 

The Mini systems were first released in 2005 as a low-end alternative to Google's larger, more expensive enterprise search systems which start at US$30,000 and can hold anywhere from 500,000 to 30 million documents.

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