Google Search Appliance (discontinued) vs. Smart Search

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

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

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

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

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