The Google Mini is back!

The hard drive on the privies Google Mini failed, and sins the warranty had expired and replacing the hard drive is quit complicated I had to take the Mini down. However I have now gotten hold of second Mini to replace it, so the Google Mini is back. The hard drive of the second Mini has failed, so it has been removed from the test.

I would also love to showcase the full Google Search Appliances, but unfortunately they cost too much, and the license expire after 3 years, so there are no used ones to buy either.

Personally identifiable information

Some of the data on this site comes from emails belonging to senior Enron officers that was originally made public, and posted to the web, by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its Enron investigation. This site and many more holds copies of this online for research purposes.

I will of course delete all personally identifiable information on request. Please contact me if you need anything removed.

Experiencing some hosting issues [Solved]

21 may 2013: This issue has been fixed

Too long; didn’t read: Lost 3 hard drives today, but are working on it. Most search engines may be down to Tuesday the 21.

It take some resources to run all the 9 search engines for this site. Each search servers run as a separate virtual machines, hosted on one of two IBM X3550 (4 Core Xeon cpu, 12 gb ram ) servers. Each hosts has 2 hard disks configured in raid 1 (both hard disks has an exact copy of all data).

Yesterday one of the hard disks failed. That is not a problem since there is a copy of the data on the other hard disk, and I had two spare disk in case something like this should happen. The hard disk is hot swappable so I replaced it with a new one and the raid started to rebuild automatically.

Then the new one failed 🙁 It got replaced again, but apparently the stress of rebuilding the raid cause both the new and the old hard disk with the data to fail!

Now I can’t rebuild the raid, and can’t copy back from backup because there is no spare disks left to put into the server.

As this wasn’t enough tomorrow and Monday are national holiday, so it is proving hard to get spare parts.

Everything is backed up, but need to get the server back up before I can restore anything. As it looks now, this will not be fixed before Tuesday the 21.

FAST Esp to reach end of support in 2013

Fast Search & Transfer was ones one of the biggest players in the enterprise search filed. But things have changes after they were acquired by Microsoft. Now it looks like Microsoft is pulling the plug on FAST Esp, there main product. Normal support will end at 7/16/2013.

More info about end dates are available at Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search page.

Microsoft will of course continue to provide the Fast Search for SharePoint search engine, but it is sad that they do not want to provide an enterprise search product that is not tied to SharePoint. Customers will have to look to other vendors.

Added Google Site Search

As part of my ongoing mission to compare all search engines, I have added Google Site Search to the collection here at Open Test Search.

Now that Google has killed of the Google Mini there cloud based site search has probably become more relevant. It appears to work great in its niche, but most advanced functions are missing.

View review: http://www.opentestsearch.com/search-engines/google-site-search-review/ .

You can as always compare it side by side with the other engines at http://www.opentestsearch.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=enron .

Google ends the Mini Search Appliance

As part of Google’s spring cleaning 2012 the Google Mini will be discontinued on July 31 2012: http://googleblog.blogspot.no/2012/07/spring-cleaning-in-summer.html .

Now the only offer from Google will be either the full Google Search Appliances that starts at approximately 30 000 $ or using the very basic, cloud hosted, Google Site Search ( from $100 to $2 000 pr year depending of number of queries).

It’s currently unknown what this will mean for the other Google Search Appliances box’es. Will there be a cheaper Google Search Appliances to fill some of the gap left by the death of the mini, or are Google considering abandoning physical search box’es all together.

Open Test Search will continue to hold our Mini up and running for the foreseeable future.

Speaking at Enterprise Search Europe 2012

I will be giving a speech about Open Test Search and how to evaluate different search technologies in general at the Enterprise Search Europe 2012 conference. If anyone is interested in getting together during the conference, please don’t hesitate to hit me up on email runarb [at] gmail [dot] com .

Se her for more info: http://www.enterprisesearcheurope.com/2012/Programme.aspx#session_5474