Likelihood to Recommend Swiftype is excellent for e-commerce companies and especially the financial services sector where speed plays a major role in executing transactions. It is also very dynamic and customizable. It is very useful for electronics/travel reservations on e-commerce sites also. The only place it is inappropriate is when it comes to indexing a website in which case Google is slightly better, as I mentioned before. There is nothing much to complain about here in regards to the breadth of applications and analytics it offers.
Read full review The Watson Explorer is great because it potentially replaces a meriad of other low-level analytics products that we would need to use for data analytics and data mining. WEX isn't really suitable much beyond doing text and data analytics and performing machine learning, so if your team doesn't really have a use-case that fits all of these categories, it is worth looking at an alternative.
Read full review Pros It's very easy to implement. The documentation is great and you can be up and running very quickly. It's easy to configure. The web-based user interface makes it super simple to configure (i.e. customize search rankings, edit synonyms, etc.). Their support is very friendly and helpful. Whenever I had a question or couldn't figure something old, they were quick to help me out. Read full review Free to try - It's possible to use most of the useful features of Watson Explore on their trial/demo accounts. Super well-designed data analytics tool - Most of the tools and features of the explorer are really useful, and truly help you fully understand the depth of any format of textual data. Extensive sources compatibility - WEX can retrieve data from a large range of sources, and the compatibility there is quite good as well. Read full review Cons Swiftype does not have indexes ready to go. When you add a new website to the search set, it takes some time to index the website. This is something that is different from what Google does. Google in this particular aspect does a relatively better job. Swiftype is very expensive, this makes it difficult for smaller companies to afford. Read full review Support is just OK, like most of the other IBM Watson products. The setup/integration is really hands-on, but it's also problematic because support later may take a considerable amount of time. UI could still use a little more improvement - part of the administration and sources dashboards are hard to navigate. The Application Builder is a great part of the product, but hard to learn/understand - this is where we needed the most support from IBM and tutorials/documentation. Read full review Alternatives Considered Google Search Appliance is no longer supported.
Apache Solr is a popular, free open source solution, but it lacks a web crawler and is more difficult to configure and maintain.
Read full review Google Cloud offers a Natural Language product, but it is just an API. This API doesn't offer the useful visualizations of relations, analytics, and graphs that IBM Watson Explorer offers on their interface. For this reason, we chose to go with IBM WEX. For later stages of our production, we decided to use Google's NLP API because we found that it was quick to integrate into production after studying data and developing models using IBM WEX.
Read full review Return on Investment It has a positive impact as it helps traders and other users to seamlessly use applications. It has a positive ROI and we would know the results in time to come. Read full review Positive - Trial/demo period. This was really useful for us to figure out what features of WEX we liked most and how difficult it would be to integrate WEX into our workflow. Negative - On-boarding was long and almost always requires support from IBM support, unlike most other products this advanced. Positive - WEX replaced a large selection of alternative products we would have to use for the same functionality, and having all of that function in one place was definitely helpful. Read full review ScreenShots