Read this blog on Google search appliance alternative for more information.
With Google announcing it will end support for the Google Search Appliance in March 2019 and transitioning from on-premise to the cloud, looking for the most viable Google Search Appliance alternatives will be a strategic goal for many GSA customers in the upcoming months.
Search has become strategic for organizations. It allows its employees and customers to efficiently access their digital assets. Restructuring a search solution is not a simple task, and should be handled with strategic importance. During 14 years, Google has helped thousands of organizations achieve their business goals, but it was not always easy to work with GSA. A lot of lessons have been learned, which will help organizations to make the right decisions about the strategy of their future enterprise search solutions.
While the Google Search Appliance provides, as usual, an intuitive user experience, it can be hard to tune the display of the results. Also, the relevance algorithm is not optimized for all the scenarios, which makes it really hard for an organization to get what they really need. Indeed, every organization has its unique “mess” of data and requires significant customization before reaching a decent level of relevance. Moreover, Google Search Appliance does not provide a personalized user search experience. All users get the same result regardless of who they are, their preferences, and their behavior from previous searches.
Search in a box doesn’t mean that as soon as you plug it in your ecosystem, you’ll automatically get a relevant search solution. Google is probably the best Web search engine, but when it comes to enterprise ecosystems, the content and its structure can be very different from the Web. By dealing with a black box and a one-size-fits-all algorithm, the organizations could never understand the behavior behind the search results.
So let’s kick this right off by recognizing the fact that replacing your Google Search Appliance is not a hassle- it’s an opportunity.
Yes, it may seem like a burden, but the truth is, this is the perfect opportunity to migrate to a site search solution that is capable of delivering not only a much better customer experience but also deeper insights and analytics.
If we’re going, to be honest, Google’s internet-focused ranking algorithms often didn’t work well in the world of enterprise information, where the needs are significantly different from website searches.
Adding that to Google’s one-size-fits-all approach and general lack of support for corporate customers makes the Google Cloud Search alternative solution, not a great option.
Create a Custom Google Search Appliance Alternative
Making a search engine is easier than ever before. With hosted search-as-a-service providers taking up the pain of building most of the search engines, the end-users’ role is limited to adding an HTML code snippet on their website to take the search live.
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
