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I am interested in software alternatives to the Google Search Appliance (GSA) for use in a (large) university context. Has anyone experiences of migrating from GSA to an alternative solution? If so, what were the reasons for doing this (technical, financial, staff effort, etc) and have the experiences been positive?

JasonMArcher
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Brian kelly
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  • while not a duplicate this question from server fault is related has a few oss solutions http://serverfault.com/questions/40356/open-source-alternative-to-google-appliance-for-intranet-search – Robb Nov 09 '10 at 14:57

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I would recommend looking up Apache Solr , it is IMHO the best scalable, feature-rich search server out there. A F/OSS out-of-the-box solution from Apache Software Foundation and used by organizations such as Netflix, AOL, CNet etc. We had used GSA in our company for an year before moving to Solr. The move was relatively painless compared to the benefits accrued.

Since it integrates with a RESTful interface it can be integrated into your platform of choice without language/platform tie-ins. Give it a whirl!

Mikos
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  • What about crawling content? SOLR seems very nice, but the de-facto crawler is Nutch which doesn't play nicely with Windows server. – dana Feb 22 '14 at 05:25
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The company I work for is a Google GSA partner and has developed a solution on top of the GSA. We also have a cloud solution with very similar benefits to the GSA and a host of things that the GSA can't do - like scale geographically, scale with load, upload data and have it in the index in near real-time, have nested records, deal with hierarchy etc...

In our experience, the people who migrated from the GSA to the Cloud solution did so for the following reasons.

  1. Primarily, they did not want to manage hardware.
  2. Most of our customers are ecommerce / media companies, and they had a lot of navigation. The GSA search throughput really struggles when you have a lot of navigations / refinements. For example if you have 20 navigations, the throughput drops from around 50 queries per second to about 12.
  3. Indexing time - the GSA has a minimum of 7 minutes for something to show up in the index, and for ecomm / media these times are unacceptable.

GroupBy has written migration tools to allow the smooth transition from GSA --> Cloud and also the cloud platform accepts the same format that the GSA accepts.

Have the experiences been positive? Well, clearly I'm going to be biased and say yes, but there are hard conversion increases that support the clients positivity. :-)

More details at: www.groupbyinc.com

Will
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We are currently moving from Google (GSA) to Microsoft FAST (specifically FSIS).

The reason is simple, we are not satisified with the Google experiance from a supportablity and manageability perspective. We have chossen FAST because it gives us a platform that can scale as our needs grow over the next few years. Also it gives us a very fine level of control. What I mean is it will give us the ability to define custom fields and then control how these fields are populated.

Jeff
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