Google Search Appliance (discontinued) vs. OpenSearch

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

OpenSearch Service presents a cost-effective pricing model, allowing users to pay solely for their usage without being burdened by minimum fees or upfront commitments. Its seamless integration with various AWS services enhances its adaptability for a wide range of data analysis requirements and also I love using it isn't it enough.

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

Incentivized

• Gives us millisecond response times
• Mainly open-source
• Integration Seamlessly with AWS
• Has a very big community so problems are fixes sooner then later

• 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

• Needs more descriptive documentation
• The UI feels a bit old
• Some functionality still doesn't work correctly

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

Well as I said, Elastic is behind paywall now and managing OpenSearch through AWS is so seamless that we just love it. It gets updates faster we don't have to manage separate infra and many other settings to work with elastic search and some of the tools that it provides are better then them.

• 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

• Well we had 200 ms response times which decreased to 100ms while using OpenSearch
• Easy to use security plugins we dont need external IAM
• Super Easy Integration with many AWS Services such as kinsesi data stream and dynamoDB