A little pricy but not too shabby
Updated December 10, 2014

A little pricy but not too shabby

Rondel Ward | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

6

Overall Satisfaction with Coveo

We implemented Coveo facets and index capabilities for several web based applications that we built for our clients in Sitecore CMS. We primarily use this product to support search pages which can find and filter content in Sitecore and display results in a customized way.
This product is used by a few of our clients across widely different verticals. Our application developers use the product most heavily.
  • 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.
  • Better user experience
  • Higher traffic on less organically found areas of the site
Coveo is well suited to crawling large collections of sitecore items and organizing content based off of templates and folder structures. Facets allow you to group related content regardless of their position in the tree which is a very useful feature for most search implementations. The price can be pretty expensive as in some cases, you may have to pay for each document which is indexed. The price/features tradeoff is probably the biggest decision to make.

Using Coveo

We still have many clients which have custom search implementations supported by Coveo which crawl their Sitecore instances. From that perspective, I'm very likely to use it again. One of the main drawbacks I have heard is that Coveo is relatively expensive. The size of your project budget may have a greater influence on your decision to use Coveo if the custom features are not must-haves for your organization.