Apache Lucene vs Coveo Relevance Platform

• We found Apache Lucene to be extremely performant in querying large amounts of data and retrieving the correct files based on the metadata provided.
• The online community offers great support for the product. Even though it is an open source tool, it is not difficult to find help online for it.
• When we were creating a proof of concept application, we found that the software worked just as well, while being run locally on a resource-limited PC.

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• Searching a large set of documents is very fast
• Support for faceted searching
• Supports synonyms through an admin panel or via an external file
• Out-of-box controls for rendering search, results, and faceting.
• Customization allows for more flexible implementations
• .NET hooks exist allowing code to be injected into its indexing process. This allows for more advanced taxonomy indexing (for example inspecting semantic information during indexing)
• Items published via Sitecore are automatically indexed (within a minute or two of publish time)
• Out-of-box support for ranking files attached to pages (PDFs, DOCs, etc) based on search term relevancy
• Supports ranking certain file types above others (giving PDFs more weight than DOCs, etc)
• Out-of-box support for crawling web pages from multiple sources. Each source can be configured with different crawl frequencies.
• Coveo 7 introduces a JavaScript search interface in conjunction with a new REST API that you can use as an alternative to the out-of-the-box Coveo .NET search interfaces. This is also customizable and even supports templating engines like mustache and underscore.
• They have a StackOverflow-like forum where you can get assistance from the community: https://answers.coveo.com/ .

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• User interface for setup and maintenance would be helpful.
• Easier cloud/cluster setup.
• Better, centralized documentation.

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• UI changes were cumbersome and timely to make changes to based on business requirements and user feedback. We were not able to optimize in the UI due to the constraints.
• Analytics in the version we had were very poor. UI was built in Silverlight with no exportable version to be able to perform further analysis of data. Many product suggestions around additional metrics needed.
• We struggled around data ranking and relevance due to the amount of unstructured data that we were indexing. This caused user adoption issues. This service and guidance was something that we were never really able to get from Coveo with my time using the product. The relevance controls were very simplistic and did not give us much control.

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• Being an open source project we did not have to pay any licensing fees for using Apache Lucene. It has greatly improved our search functionality in our web apps.

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• Quick to find things in a massive database when needed.
• Results need to be more concise - sometimes we spend more time looking for the right file than if we were to just search amongst our own networks instead.
• Coveo is not always the most useful but does its job when general information is needed.

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