HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. Luigi's Box

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Wide access to the analysis panel that supports sales and helps analyze user behavior.
• Adapting functionality to the partner's needs, which confirms the flexibility of the tool.
• The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• More choice for customisation and layout would be good.
• More payment options for example the choice to pay via direct debit.

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

Luigi's Box just slots in nicely to the website with very little code and has no negative impact on pagespeed scores. Having been using it for a number of months now, we have had no bugs or downtime. The search functionality works for every customer and even our staff use it every day to get to the product they want faster.

Incentivized

Their support is excellent. Quick and helpful.

In my opinion, Luigi's Box is superior. It was much easier to implement, customer service was better, the search results are much more accurate, the customization options are much more advanced, the analytics section is superior and the price for all of the tools that Luigi's Box has to offer is extremely reasonable. We did also try to build our own product in house, but this proved very difficult and complicated to get the results we wanted.

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Reduction in the number of abandoned carts - since the launch of the service, we have seen a drop in cart abandonment by more than 10%
• Lower reports of product search problems from customers
• Analytical accounts - they were able to recommend many things to us and improve services