I recently had the opportunity to work with one of Google’s latest search applances, the Mini. Having no previous experience with any of Google’s search hardware, this seems an excellent opportunity to offer a newcomer’s first impressions.

I. Setup & Configuration

Setting things up turned out to be more painless than I had expected. Upon opening the box, I found the contents to be only what was necessary. It consisted of 5 things: the Mini itself, a yellow Cat5 cable, an orange Cat5 crossover cable, a power cable, and the manual/quick-start guide (and a snazzy tshirt!). That’s it, nothing else! No product catalogs, no coupons, no massive collection of multilingual warranty booklets, and most importantly no unnecessary clutter.

II. User Interface

The UI of the administration panel is clean and to the point - very much what one would expect from Google, and consistent with Google’s overall style across the rest of their product line. All the administrative functions are organized categorically and only one menu-level deep, making virtually any administrative action no more than 2 clicks away.

III. API/Programmatic Usability

Accessing the mini’s search capabilities programmatically works very much as one might expect - executing search queries via GET or POST and returning the results in an easily parsable XML format. Additional options are also available, though I found the XML format to be the most flexible for the circumstances. It is so easy to use I actually had to debate whether or not writing a PHP wrapper class was actually necessary. In the end I decided it would make sense, though even then writing the class itself was a breeze.

IV. Thoughts

Overall I am very impressed with this little beast. It clearly isn’t over-engineered and for its intended scale of use it is not underpowered. I would have liked to see more flexibility in managing the crawling process and in how results were returned, but these things would have been icing on a cake that is already fantastic on its own.

For anyone considering the acquisition of one of these, I highly recommend it. For small to medium applications you can’t beat the price, especially when compared to the mini’s bigger brother. And its usability both through the UI and programatically are very intuitive and easy to dive into. Well done Google, well done!