Google Search Appliance (discontinued) vs. Inbenta Enterprise Search

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

If you are looking for an enterprise search platform that offers an easy to use interface and if high performance is not really your priority, then I believe Inbenta Enterprise Search would fit your use case. For most other situations, I would recommend using a tried and tested search platform like Apache Solr.

Incentivized

• Homes in on key searches.
• Immediate response.
• Simple UI, very user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Fairly easy to use interface.
• Quick to onboard new users, both in terms of access as well as training.
• The NLP-based semantic search feature is quite impressive.

Incentivized

• 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

• It is a fairly new tool in the market, so not much market feedback exists for this. This made us apprehensive in using it.
• The documentation and online forums are bare minimum.
• Quite buggy when working with multiple sources.

Incentivized

Neutral rating because I've never needed support.

Incentivized

Google search has always been superior. No other search engine application can even come close.

Incentivized

Apache Solr to Inbenta is like Java to Python. Apache Solr is powerful and handles complex search platforms well. Inbenta, on the other hand, is meant to be easy to use and does not lay too much emphasis on performance. If you are a small or medium business, Inbenta may suit your needs better. However, if you wish to manage a large and complex search platform, Solr is the way to go.

Incentivized

• 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

• Enabled our developers to quickly deploy changes to the search model.
• NLP-powered semantic search feedback provides good actionable insights.

Incentivized