HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. Luigi's Box vs. Sitecore Search

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.

Reflektion is very well suited for ecommerce sites that are looking to provide their customers meaningful product recommendations tailored to their specific user experience on our site. We are also beginning to use Reflektion for search results. If you find that your customer base uses your search bar or is having issues with their search experience, Reflektion offers a great auto complete search results feature. We have a sister site that only offers a small catalog of products and we do no use the auto search results feature on this site. If your company has a small catalog the search results tool may not be as effective. I cannot think of a scenario in which an ecommerce site would not find it helpful to provide customized product recommendations to their customers.

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Recognising synonyms and mis-spellings to still show our customers accurate and relevant search results.
• Great analytics section showing trending searches and non-converting searches, aiding in future product development and our priorities for what products we want to show the customer.
• The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.

• Reflektion provides individualized results based off each customer's unique browse experience on the site. This is beneficial because it gets more accurate results than segmenting customers by certain behaviors consistent with other customers.
• Reflektion is responsive to our business. They treat each request with professionalism and work to find solutions quickly.
• Reflektion has several beneficial features to further enhance the customer experience through a learning environment. Reflektion learns synonyms and is able to adjust for more accurate results. They also provide full page results with faceted navigation which leverages the individualized learning into the product results specific for each customer in a seamless integration with the site.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• More choice for customisation and layout would be good.
• More payment options for example the choice to pay via direct debit.

• While I mentioned that training our team in using the Reflektion dashboard was quite pain free, the dashboard can get a little overwhelming to a first time user. There are a lot of options and customization features available that can be intimidating at first.
• There isn't really too much for us to criticize with Reflektion. As I said, we switched from another product to Reflektion and so far have had almost no issues. When they do come up, the Reflektion team has been very helpful.

Incentivized

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

As I mentioned in the previous points, Luigis Box helped us to improve the overall services for our customers, whether in the area of ​​product search, optimization of various processes, improvement of service quality, etc. Within our company, all of us who work with him are really satisfied with him. If we were to recommend the tool we use to other companies, Luigi's Box would be a clear choice for us :)

Their support is excellent. Quick and helpful.

The price is a lot better than Clerk, and the speed of integration is much simpler. Our IT team had so many issues intergating Clerk and the price kept on increasing. Whereas with Luigi's Box it was the exact opposite. Price is good for the system you receive and the integration is easy.

Incentivized

Reflektion is a very cost-effective, complete solution providing individualization for preview search, product recommendations, full page search, and content. Compared to the other services they offered more features utilizing SOLR results but with continued learning. Other services didn't have the full list of capabilities or were much more expensive.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Simple construction of a data feed = low cost
• Easy to implement with the provided script - without having to hire a programmer
• The search results presented after minor configuration are much better than in search engines built into SaaS e-commerce

• Increasing conversion rate is almost always the goal when we start a new project and it is safe to say that Reflektion has helped us increase conversion rate for customers clicking through product recommendations.
• With our previous recommendations engine, tweaking and customizing the recommendations on our site was not nearly as effective or easy as it is with Reflektion. This has saved us countless hours in dev and manual operations work.
• We have not seen any negative impacts of Reflektion and hope this continues.

Incentivized