Read a review this weekend in PCWorld of O-yA’s Deep Search 100. This is a standalone search box that retails for $3,000. Plug it in to your network, and it will index files on the machines connected to that network. Then anyone with permission can search for relevant information across the network.
Just a couple problems. First, PCWorld notes that the searching is fairly limited,
Searches simply look for all documents that contain every keyword you list. You can’t search for instance of an exact phrase, and you can’t exclude results that have a certain keyword.
Second, the number of documents that can be indexed is fairly limited. According to PCWorld, the $3,000 box is limited to indexing only 100,000 documents.
At that price, depending on the size of the organization, you could buy something like DT Search Network and a decent server to host it. Index millions of files taking up terabytes of data, and with numerous ways to search it. The only drawback to DTSearch is its reliance on a client application rather than implementing a Google-style web interface for searching as O-YA Deep Search 100 does.