Coveo Relevance Platform vs Google Search Appliance

• 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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• 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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• 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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• There isn’t any support for GSA anymore.

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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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• 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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