The updated Google Mini Box now searches Microsoft Sharepoint data as well.

    The only piece of hardware that Google (GOOG) sells is a rebranded Dell (DELL) yellow box (or Blue) called the Google Search Appliance. Google sells these to businesses that have content behind a firewall which can't be indexed by Google's normal spiders. These businesses want to privately catalogue Intranet and back-office data using Google's integrated search features without sending data to Google.

    Today Google announced that these boxes will integrate company data from Cloud sources including Google Docs and E-mail, Twitter, company websites, blogs and other industry sources. Google also includes and updated people search feature ...

    which makes it easy to find experts and contact coworkers who are related to a search query, right from the search results page. For example, a search for "field marketing" would return a list of field marketing team members alongside other relevant content. Organizations can index personnel information like department, interests, expertise and location, and there's an LDAP connector to help get People Search up and running quickly.

    The prices for these boxes and related searches start at $3000 for indexing 50,000 items and goes up depending on the amount of data.

    The updated Google Search Appliance 6.8 includes:

    • Cloud Connect - integrated search with Google Apps, Site Search and Twitter

    • People Search - Search profile information about people in the organization

    • Dynamic Navigation - filter search results with specific metadata attributes

    • Active-Active - provide high availability by directing search traffic to multiple appliances

    • Sharepoint 2010 - Search all content within Sharepoint 2010 out of the box.