Which of the two provides a better API for developing on top of?
Although there is a virtual Google Search Appliance available for download, no such equivalent is present for FAST.
So looking to developers with experience in either of these products to give suggestions and links to documentation. (especially for FAST as there's none available on their site)
Kind regards,
I'm pretty sure that FAST does not provide a trial download of their Enteprise Search Platform (ESP) today nor it's SDK (which is useless without ESP).
FAST is pretty much the industry leader for customization (Google is popular as simple out of the box solution and Autonomy seems to be the leader in compliance) which is what you are likely intrested in an API for. But not Cheap. Internal Python customization for processing documents, exteral .NET & Java API for interacting with the service.
Also, you if you are looking for a basic Enteprise Search + API, google on "Solr" project.
I think FAST provides a free trail version. Along with it comes the API documentation and other manuals. My company uses it. I use it.
Answering your queston, FAST is obviously better than Google search appliance (for various reasons). That's my view.
Freddie
I have worked on Google Search Appliance and it works great. I can search in meta-data, get selective data back from query, see real time status of documents that are getting crawled, scalable with GSA6.14 and all great support from Google.
Apache Solr is a great solution with a very flexible client API. You should definitely check it out. We are moving from FAST to Solr currently & I find the features and API of Solr much better than FAST ESP.
