Amazon CloudSearch vs Google Search Appliance

Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon Cloudsearch can be suitable for some queries that require fast data. For example, in our case, we used CloudSearch, in a tool called Global Search. That will search everything like names, emails and a lot of stuff in our application. If you want fast data and you have a simple query, Global Search isn't appropriate for you.

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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The Google Search Appliance is well suited to most site search needs and it is possible to customize the front end seen by website visitors to produce a satisfactory basic interface with basic branding applied to it. However, in some situations it may be necessary to instead make API calls from a web page to retrieve search results and the format in which those results are returned might be a little more difficult to work with.

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Pros

Really fast queries
Good Reporting
Reduce the cost of the server

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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The GSA is able to organize collections of content in many different permutations, based on your needs.
The logs of searches and served results can offer insights into what visitors/customers are seeking, and whether they're finding what they need.
Default front-ends are relatively easy to set up - if they meet your needs.

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

Can take some time to implement
The initial configuration can be tricky
Takes some time to update the values

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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It's my understanding that Google is ending support for the appliance soon. This is obviously an important consideration.
The administrator interface is far from easy to use.
There is a significant learning curve for new users.

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

I didn't investigate the best alternatives to CloudSearch, but did help with implementing this feature in our application. But from what i tested and used - Cloudsearch is very fast to get queries. Some negative points can be the time to implement this and some configurations that can be tricky.

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Positive Point - Reduced the server load
Negative point - Not suitable for all queries
Negative Point - Time to implement this feature

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Verified User

Engineer in Product Management

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 51-200 employees

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The GSA was not cheap. At all.
There has also been a cost associated with our need to switch to another site search solution in the near future, due to Google ending support for the sppliance.
That said, we have so much support content that we owed it to our customers to offer a comprehensive search tool to help them find the most relevant content - and of course Google are the masters of this. However, it's worth noting that the alogorithms used on the GSA are far older than those used on google.com.

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Verified User

Manager in Marketing

Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employees

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Amazon CloudSearch vs Google Search Appliance