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Apache Solr vs. Google Search Appliance (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Apache Solr

    Score7.9 out of 10
    N/AApache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.N/A

    Google Search Appliance (discontinued)

    Score9.4 out of 10
    N/AThe Google Search Appliance provided document indexing. The product was discontinued in favor of Google's cloud-based options.N/A
    Pricing
    Apache SolrGoogle Search Appliance (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Apache SolrGoogle Search Appliance (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    Apache SolrGoogle Search Appliance (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    Elasticsearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Elasticsearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Elasticsearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Elasticsearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Amazon CloudSearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Amazon CloudSearch
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Apache SolrGoogle Search Appliance (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (11 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Apache SolrGoogle Search Appliance (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Apache
    Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Apache
    • Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going.
    • Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets.
    • Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • Homes in on key searches.
    • Immediate response.
    • Simple UI, very user-friendly.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Apache
    • These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes.
    • We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems:
    • First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time.
    • Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases.
    • Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status.
    • If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems.
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    Discontinued Products
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Apache
    It takes some time to deploy and currectly maintein it. And also, to learn how to use and integrate in the enviroment as well. Once you get theses steps done, it usability is very simple, and almost of the time it don't require no further attention on it. Even for maintence, if you deploy it on a cluster mode, it is very reliable and easy to take one host down.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Apache
    No answers on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    Neutral rating because I've never needed support.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Apache
    We tried to use both Elasticsearch and Swiftype with Drupal 8 but there are currently no good modules that integrate Drupal with those solutions. So Solr was really the only option for a Drupal 8 web site. It's not as easy to learn or use as Swiftype, but in the end I think it will be a little less expensive and offer more customization and flexibility.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    Google search has always been superior. No other search engine application can even come close.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Apache
    • It has enabled my organization to find information faster by being a one-stop service to search across content that were indexed from varying sources.
    • By using synonyms and usual lemmatizations / stemming, it enabled discovery of new content following every search.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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