Read Google site search discontinued – Replacement options for more information.
Google Site Search vs Elasticsearch
You can’t compare Elastic Search and Google Site Search. Elastic Search is a search framework/server in which you can develop your own search solution and GSS is a product/solution.
Google Site Search includes a UI for the marketing & development team where they can add synonyms and customize the design.
As you likely know by now, Google decided to discontinue the sale/renewal of their Google Site Search product last year. On April 1, 2018, the product will be shut down for good.
Google Site Search was the trusted site search solution for thousands of businesses. GSS made it easy to index data from web pages, and it provided relevant search right out of the box. While some companies may wish they could just stick with GSS, they have no choice but to move on.
Many organizations used GSS because of Google’s well-known history of building search technology. And who can blame them? It’s easy to think that Google can effectively handle internal search for a single website if it can index the whole Internet’s content (over 100,000,000 gigabytes) and search over it in milliseconds.
Elastic Site Search is a hosted, ad-free alternative to CSE that provides website owners complete control over their search results through an intuitive dashboard. With Elastic Site Search, you can deliver an elegant, customizable search with always-relevant results. With CSE you can’t be sure about what’s going to show up in your search results (such as ads, maybe even from your competitors). With Elastic Site Search, you can easily craft the exact search experience you want, rather than relying on a Google algorithm and hoping for the best.
However, Elasticsearch is not a plug and play solution. You will need to do a fair bit of coding before you can get Elasticsearch up and running. ExpertRec provides an easier approach to building a search:
- 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.
