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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

It did take off. There were server pizza boxes and everything. It was killed in 2011 by the very same company that is now introducing it as a "new app" in 2025.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283722910233

https://web.archive.org/web/20060112110931/https://desktop.g...

The dead Internet theory continues to prevail. What is old is new again because nothing new can be created. The Hollywood reboots formula works, so we continue it with technology reboots.

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Those boxes were for enterprises, not for you to plug into your laptop.

Right. The box wasn't necessary to search, but was an indicator of Google Desktop's success. Furthermore, we can still leverage the dead binary with just a little system hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ieNv7oelk

What's the relationship between the search appliance and Google Desktop? I'm not seeing any connection.

I’m not the OP but I see the connection as Google seeking growth and revenue by applying their general search know-how to areas outside of the Internet.

I followed search appliance closely when they announced it. It was interesting technically and looked cool, but seemed like a dead end similar to desktop as applications were largely moving off of racks/desktops. I was right about that, but I expected Google to offer a web-based search appliance and they never did beyond custom searches. Algolia fills that opportunity nicely now.

I'm guessing, I think the box was marketed as a networked version of the app, and GP might be drawing a bit hand-wavy connection between the two.

There was an Enterprise version of the Desktop app that connected to the Google Search Appliance (yellow pizzabox) or Google Mini (blue pizzabox, not Google Home Mini) as well as searching Windows/Mac local/shared drives https://web.archive.org/web/20070302151851/https://desktop.g...

Could you clarify how this relates to the dead internet theory?

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