Google search appliance discontinued – What next?

Google search appliance has been discontinued as of March 2019. In this article, we will see how to replace your Google search appliance with Expertrec.

Here are the search trends for Google search appliance from 2004. The searches for Google search appliance has reduced and the search for Google search appliance replacement has increased after 2017.

Google Search Appliance (GSA) – End of life

Google, had always offered Search for the rest of the world.  Be it through a web search or through any of their other products for offline search.  Here is a brief line of products in chronological order.

Google Desktop – 2004 to  2011  – solved the search for content on your local disk.

Google Search Appliance 2002 – 2018 – solved the search problem for a local network.

Google used to sell a 2U appliance (GB-1001) capable of indexing up to 5,000,000 documents, a half-rack cluster (GB-5005) of five 2U nodes capable of indexing up to 10,000,000 documents, and a full-rack cluster (GB-8008) of eight and later twelve nodes capable of indexing up to 30,000,000 documents. Some models were based on Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U rackmount servers.

The Google Mini was a smaller and lower-cost solution that occupied 1U of rack space for small and medium-sized businesses to set up a search engine that allowed them to index and search up to 300,000 documents. The hardware was manufactured by Super Micro Computer, Inc. The Google Mini was discontinued beginning July 31, 2012.

For a brief period in 2008 Google offered a virtual version of the Google Search Appliance aimed at developers. The virtual edition could be downloaded free of charge and index up to 50,000 documents. It was soon discontinued for unknown reasons.

The most recent models are G100 and G500.

Model G100, a 2U appliance, can index up to 20M documents. The G500 5U appliance can index up to 100M documents.

Now that Google has deserted us, what is the best way forward?

Some of the features to look for when looking to replace your Google search appliance are

1. Search relevancy/ Ranking algorithm control– The search ranking algorithm is one of the key things that can help in retrieving the right search results. With Google’s search appliance, you had access to Google’s ranking methodology. When you replace your search, make sure you have control over your search ranking algorithm.
2. Search autocomplete– Search autocomplete or type-ahead is one of the key search features available in GSA. The quality of the search suggestions can determine the success of your GSA migration.
3. Spell Check- Google search appliance spell checker helps in correcting spelling errors suited to the user behavior of your site. This is another important search feature to look for. When you get a free trial from your search vendor, check this functionality.
4. Faceting and search navigation-Filters and facets help in drilling down to narrow your search results.
5. Crawler- Ask your search vendor about the crawler frequency, whether it can crawl Javascript heavy pages.
6. Search analytics- Search analytics and reporting capabilities to understand what is the user search behavior and clickstream analysis.
7. Connector Integration- Integration with connectors such as Amazon S3 buckets,  Atlassian, Salesforce, etc.

How to replace your Google search appliance with Expertrec

1. Go to https://cse.expertrec.com/?platform=cse
2. Enter your website URL.
3. Enter a sitemap if you have one.
4. Choose your nearest data center.
5. If you have some content behind a login, follow the steps in this article-https://blog.expertrec.com/crawling-behind-login-authenticated-pages/
6. Wait for the crawler to finish crawling your website content.
7. Check the demo.
8. Take live by adding the code to your website.
9. That’s it!
10. There are more features inside the expertrec control panel that can help in making your Google search appliance migration smoother..
    

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