To most Internet users, Google is magic. Complex things like search and maps become so simple and easy we can’t imagine using anyone else. Pulling back the curtain, though, there are a lot of gears churning, a bit of smoke belching, and somewhere in the back is a guy with a hammer, banging on some obstinate part of the machine until it works. This week, I’m the guy with the hammer.
We have a Google Search Appliance at work (you can buy one for yourself on-line), and it does a fine job if you plug it in and let it crawl and serve your company’s open pages. Where it gets much more interesting is if you want to control what goes in (go write your own crawler to feed it) and what comes out (implement their security interface).
As the lead of this part of the project, I’m now getting to deal with all of this as we come up against a deadline. The particularly frustrating part has been trying to get support from Google. You would think this is a no-brainer, being a big company paying a big pile of money to another big company for just that purpose. But like everyone else, they’re trying to cut costs by pushing us towards self-help and community forums.
Once we did get them on the phone, things began to improve as they revealed some of the logs on their very locked-down appliance that made some problems clear. Others were slightly beyond their first line of support; after continuously hearing how selective Google’s hiring is, it’s bemusing to know we can still stump some of them.
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