Google Mini is designed to help you find content within your organization. It comes in a little blue box. You plug it into the wall, plug it into your network, configure 3 things through a web page and you are set to go. A small scale version of Google’s robot is now crawling through all your content, building rank-ordered results. It has some truly brilliant features. For example, because it is a search appliance, the entire search database is constantly being rebuilt. This means if something goes wrong with the box, you can mail it back to Google, get a new one sent out, and be up and running in no time.

There is only one problem. Most companies don’t have any real HTML based content.

As a result, Google’s search ranking produces results that are only about as good as Autonomy’s Verity search engine. In other words, the results aren’t great. When I have used internal search tools powered by Verity, it seemed to be able to find things with the right key-words, but nothing was rank ordered. I would get a list of 500 documents, and the one I needed could be number 3 or number 387.

We also don’t need RSS aggregators….yet.

Why would any company buy an RSS aggregator when it’s people are not creating a whole bunch of RSS feeds.

Clearly, Search and Aggregation are going to be critical components of any Web Office solution, but they are part of phase two. Phase one is a lot more basic. Companies need tools that give their knowledge workers the power to create HTML content.

That means, first and foremost, companies need internal enterprise blogs and enterprise wikis.

Only then will there be something worth searching.