Apache Lucene vs. Google Search Appliance (discontinued)

Apache Lucene offers great full-text search library that makes it easy to add search functionality to a website or other applications. Lucene is ideal if you want low-level access to the indexes and its APIs. For general purposes, Apache Solr, the web application built atop of Lucene can be used instead. Apache Solr comes with caching, HTTP/ JSON APIs and a simple web administration console.

Incentivized

The Google Search Appliance is well suited to most site search needs and it is possible to customize the front end seen by website visitors to produce a satisfactory basic interface with basic branding applied to it. However, in some situations it may be necessary to instead make API calls from a web page to retrieve search results and the format in which those results are returned might be a little more difficult to work with.

Incentivized

• Fast indexing, with proper optimization I can index a Gig of data in 2 mins.
• Easy integration with web crawlers
• Quick and Accurate Results
• Flexible sorting option for results based on the search field and relevance

Incentivized

• Homes in on key searches.
• Immediate response.
• Simple UI, very user-friendly.

Incentivized

• We had difficulty porting the project to a cluster based environment on the cloud.
• For our particular use case of retrieving documents based on text pattern matching, the program worked efficiently however, we did not find many resources for image pattern recognition based on their metadata.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Neutral rating because I've never needed support.

Incentivized

The search and index performance of [Apache] Lucene is excellent and the quality of results is good, if not better. For implementing it with small scale applications it is a no brainer, Lucene is the best and most cost effective solution. Learning curve is not too steep either.

Incentivized

Google search has always been superior. No other search engine application can even come close.

Incentivized

• Very good at using minimal hardware sets saving money on hosting.
• Very good at housing multiple cores or instances.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized