Site search from a name you can trust, but with support ending soon
October 25, 2017
Site search from a name you can trust, but with support ending soon
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Search Appliance
We have used the Google Search Appliance to index and serve search results for multiple related properties. We allow it to crawl a marketing site and a repository of online product support content. Content from both sources may or may not appear in different search results, depending on the use case. Sometimes it's appropriate to serve results from a wider array of content, sometimes it isn't. In this respect, it has been helpful to segment/filter the results that surface as appropriate, using a single tool.
- The GSA is able to organize collections of content in many different permutations, based on your needs.
- The logs of searches and served results can offer insights into what visitors/customers are seeking, and whether they're finding what they need.
- Default front-ends are relatively easy to set up - if they meet your needs.
- 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.
- 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.