Coveo is an enterprise search technology which can index data on disparate cloud systems making it easier to retrieve. It has integrated plug-ins for Salesforce.com, Sitecore CEP, and Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint.
$600
per month
Google Search Appliance (discontinued)
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
The Google Search Appliance provided document indexing. The product was discontinued in favor of Google's cloud-based options.
Coveo Relevance Cloud is a great solution to implement into Salesforce to provide Knowledge-Centered Support, Enhancements to a Customer Community, to provide sales aids, or to complement your customized app in Salesforce.
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.
It would be great if Coveo 6 allowed you to rebuild indexes from a certain subtree instead of needing to rebuild the entire tree to see changes. This functionality was added in Coveo 7 and is very useful.
In Coveo 6, integration with Sitecore is more difficult than one would expect. This integration is much improved in Coveo 7.
I have seen cases where an exception thrown when crawling a specific document will cause the indexing to stop completely. I believe this only happens in implementations using custom faceting but it could be handled more efficiently if the trouble document was skipped and the indexing could continue.
Relevancy ranking editor is good but not as powerful as GSA. GSA offers a self-learning scorer which automatically analyzes user behavior and the specific links that users click on for specific queries to fine tune relevance and scoring.
We've ran into issues on multiple clients with Sitecore items being indexed multiple times in Sitecore 7 and Coveo 7. The fix Coveo suggested was to upgrade our Sitecore version and Coveo but unfortunately this didn't resolve our issue. After months of testing we were finally able to resolve this by implementing our own CoveoItemCrawler to get around the issue (based on https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SC201404/Items+in+the+Same+Language+Gets+Indexed+Multiple+Times;jsessionid=3C1A2AE33540E0A0B8BB52BA3A64AF70).
Integration with RabbitMQ in Coveo 7 seems error prone. We often see the error "The AMQP operation was interrupted" and on occasion, need to restart the Coveo service to get this operating again. In some extreme cases, we have also had to restart the server because of issues when attempting to restart the Coveo service.
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.
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.
