Awesome, how could I have missed this. Thanks for sharing. The time line is interesting too. Weird that these histories of Google that I read downplay this thing, as it ran quite long according to this doc. Will update the post.
I think there’s just not enough value there. Content in a company is probably already going to be in some CMS (Jira, GitHub, Dropbox) which probably already has search. Google would add cross-service search on private data but that’s peanuts in added value. It’ll be probably hell to configure the integration, and maybe Google’s culture couldn’t even do the integrations at all — if I look at how GCP has bad customer service and how Stadia failed.
The hardware product was called Google Appliance, and it was real. I can’t imagine they really made money off it, but it might have helped stomp out competitors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance
Awesome, how could I have missed this. Thanks for sharing. The time line is interesting too. Weird that these histories of Google that I read downplay this thing, as it ran quite long according to this doc. Will update the post.
I think there’s just not enough value there. Content in a company is probably already going to be in some CMS (Jira, GitHub, Dropbox) which probably already has search. Google would add cross-service search on private data but that’s peanuts in added value. It’ll be probably hell to configure the integration, and maybe Google’s culture couldn’t even do the integrations at all — if I look at how GCP has bad customer service and how Stadia failed.
Still, quite interesting they only kiled it in 2016. This rundown (without sources) covers some issues:
https://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/lessons-death-google-search-appliance
Nice find!