AddSearch is a hosted search tool for any website from the company of the same name in Helsinki. It is presented as fast and able to works on all devices to give users full control. The vendor states users of AddSearch will experience an instant search with a modern and beautiful interface. The system has been built to scale to large amounts of users all across the globe.
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Google Search Appliance (discontinued)
Score 9.4 out of 10
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The Google Search Appliance provided document indexing. The product was discontinued in favor of Google's cloud-based options.
We're very happy with the search results, and even better, the ability to impact the actual results with their weighting and priority tools. The integration was easy enough, but the expectations during the sales process was that the AddSearch team would handle more of the implementation. At the end of the day this wasn't a huge deal due to our internal engineering team, but is a caveat for others. We're happy to see continued development of the product and the infusion of AI in the feature set.
The Google Search Appliance is well suited to most site search needs and it is possible to customize the front end seen by website visitors to produce a satisfactory basic interface with basic branding applied to it. However, in some situations it may be necessary to instead make API calls from a web page to retrieve search results and the format in which those results are returned might be a little more difficult to work with.
AddSearch was not as customizable as the other solutions we looked at, but it was also seemed to be the easiest to integrate. Ultimately, the integration time took longer than expected, but was still relatively easy. The interface was an easier to use interface than the competitors we looked at. Price was also a factor as AddSearch was a lower cost.
There has also been a cost associated with our need to switch to another site search solution in the near future, due to Google ending support for the sppliance.
That said, we have so much support content that we owed it to our customers to offer a comprehensive search tool to help them find the most relevant content - and of course Google are the masters of this. However, it's worth noting that the alogorithms used on the GSA are far older than those used on google.com.