Here are the features that Google search appliance offered. Since GSA has shut down, here is a list of features you must look for when looking for a suitable replacement.
10 features of the Google Search Appliance
- Sorting by metadata – This feature helps in filtering search results by date, author, relevance, etc. Metadata is the different fields attached to a piece of data. (for example category, author, date of publishing, etc.)
- Wildcard search- If you don,t know certain parts of a sentence you can just use * or ? to search. This is done by using a technology called stemming by most search engine providers. The search appliance supports two
wildcard:operators:- *–Matches zero or more characters
- ?–matches exactly 1 character
- Entity recognition-The search engine can extract data like date, author. In the below example the search engine can extract country, date, city, etc.
- Spell check- Spell check helps in correcting commonly made search spelling errors.
- Synonyms– Synonyms helps to add non obvious word relations. For example if users are searching for “open source technologies” and if you don’t have any articles matching “open source”, you can say Linux, ubuntu, solr are synonyms for open source and articles matching these will come up in search results.
- Search Translation– Your content can be searched in more than 70 languages.
- User learning-based search scorer-GSA builds user profiles for each user and shows relevant search results based on their search behavior for faster content discovery.
- Autocomplete– Autocomplete helps in finding relevant search results with minimal search strokes.
- Dynamic navigation or filters- Search results can be further drilled down to show relevant search results in a faster time.
- Inbuilt crawler-The crawler is a web program that traverses through your website and makes available this content in your search results.
