The new features could be an attempt by the firm to improve its standing among smaller enterprises, and extend the success it has had with the Mini in public sector and education verticals into new areas. It’s also pretty clear that with rivals IBM and Microsoft both offering competing products at this low end which unlike the Mini are free (IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition and Microsoft Search Server Express) Google has had to offer something more than basic enterprise search to get the attention of corporate buyers.

Google has just updated its Mini enterprise search appliance, as some of you may have noticed. Now there are myriad enterprise search vendors knocking about and they are all trying to differentiate – some, like Autonomy and Fast, are purely targeted at the high end large enterprise market, while others, Google, Microsoft and IBM included, have a range of products to meet the needs of different sized organisations. With the Mini, Google is really targeting the small to mid sized market, probably firms with no more than 2000 users or so – its Google Search Appliance range takes it from there into the larger sized organisations.

The firm USP seems to be in trying to apply its mantra for web search to the enterprise space, that is to democratise access to information – to enable all employees to reach the info they need, in a safe and secure manner. Implementation and maintenance is also a differentiator for the firm, Google believes; the box can be up and running in a matter of weeks not months, although the vendor’s UK head of enterprise Robert Whiteside stressed that this shouldn’t be firms’ main reason for buying the appliance.

So why should firms invest in the Mini? Well, Google certainly seems to be ramping up the feature-set in its low-end appliance. The latest to be added, aside from the obligatory extended language support, are the ability to index content on shared files, as well as date and source bias capabilities. As the name suggests, this means customers can give greater weight to older or newer documents as they wish, and can also specify by source which types of content they rate more highly.