Coveo Relevance Cloud

Content Connectors

Out of the box UI Integration into Salesforce

Developer Toolset

Debugging information about failures in connectors

Coveo is fast, search results come up quick (though it's not always great).

Not much complexity to run.

Coveo is implemented within our portal and doesn't require extra steps to use it.

Coveo does its job but is lacking.

The results displayed by Coveo are not always relevant.

The results displayed by Coveo are not sorted, nor is there an option to sort.

The results displayed by Coveo are not location-specific, so results not relevant to my area or country gets shown.

Searching a large set of documents is very fast

Support for faceted searching

Supports synonyms through an admin panel or via an external file

Out-of-box controls for rendering search, results, and faceting.

Customization allows for more flexible implementations

.NET hooks exist allowing code to be injected into its indexing process. This allows for more advanced taxonomy indexing (for example inspecting semantic information during indexing)

Items published via Sitecore are automatically indexed (within a minute or two of publish time)

Out-of-box support for ranking files attached to pages (PDFs, DOCs, etc) based on search term relevancy

Supports ranking certain file types above others (giving PDFs more weight than DOCs, etc)

Out-of-box support for crawling web pages from multiple sources. Each source can be configured with different crawl frequencies.

Coveo 7 introduces a JavaScript search interface in conjunction with a new REST API that you can use as an alternative to the out-of-the-box Coveo .NET search interfaces. This is also customizable and even supports templating engines like mustache and underscore.

They have a StackOverflow-like forum where you can get assistance from the community: https://answers.coveo.com/ .

It would be great if Coveo 6 allowed you to rebuild indexes from a certain subtree instead of needing to rebuild the entire tree to see changes. This functionality was added in Coveo 7 and is very useful.

In Coveo 6, integration with Sitecore is more difficult than one would expect. This integration is much improved in Coveo 7.

I have seen cases where an exception thrown when crawling a specific document will cause the indexing to stop completely. I believe this only happens in implementations using custom faceting but it could be handled more efficiently if the trouble document was skipped and the indexing could continue.

Relevancy ranking editor is good but not as powerful as GSA. GSA offers a self-learning scorer which automatically analyzes user behavior and the specific links that users click on for specific queries to fine tune relevance and scoring.

We've ran into issues on multiple clients with Sitecore items being indexed multiple times in Sitecore 7 and Coveo 7. The fix Coveo suggested was to upgrade our Sitecore version and Coveo but unfortunately this didn't resolve our issue. After months of testing we were finally able to resolve this by implementing our own CoveoItemCrawler to get around the issue (based on https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SC201404/Items+in+the+Same+Language+Gets+Indexed+Multiple+Times;jsessionid=3C1A2AE33540E0A0B8BB52BA3A64AF70).

Integration with RabbitMQ in Coveo 7 seems error prone. We often see the error "The AMQP operation was interrupted" and on occasion, need to restart the Coveo service to get this operating again. In some extreme cases, we have also had to restart the server because of issues when attempting to restart the Coveo service.

Good library of connectors to enterprise repositories including MS SharePoint, Exchange, Confluence. OOTB using the Open Connector API administrators were fairly easily be able to index content repositories.

Good security integration with existing repositories.

UI changes were cumbersome and timely to make changes to based on business requirements and user feedback. We were not able to optimize in the UI due to the constraints.

Analytics in the version we had were very poor. UI was built in Silverlight with no exportable version to be able to perform further analysis of data. Many product suggestions around additional metrics needed.

We struggled around data ranking and relevance due to the amount of unstructured data that we were indexing. This caused user adoption issues. This service and guidance was something that we were never really able to get from Coveo with my time using the product. The relevance controls were very simplistic and did not give us much control.