Amazon CloudSearch is enterprise search as a service, from Amazon Web Services.
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Sitecore Search
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Sitecore Search (or Sitecore Discover, formerly Reflektion), is a customer centric personalization platform that optimizes customer experiences on an individual basis in real time.
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.
Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.
Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.
While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.
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.
Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.
Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.
