Google Search Appliance (discontinued) vs. Lucidworks Fusion

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

Very well suited for out of the box enterprise search applications.

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

Incentivized

• Signals feature to boost search results helps search relevancy
• Business Rules feature for tuning search results
• Query pipeline design gives great flexibility in application development

• 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

• Documentation can be improved

It is incredibly intuitive and so easy to use that business people can now complete functions that used to be limited to software developers only.

Neutral rating because I've never needed support.

Incentivized

It has continued to improve over the years.

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

Incentivized

IDOL seems to be a blackbox solution. Fusion is much more flexible with more features and options for developers to choose from.

• 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

• Allowed us to move software developers from enterprise search to other customer focused applications due to built in signals processing and related popularity boosting out of the box.
• Enabled business experts to work directly with Fusion to influence search results and not be so dependent on developers.