Google Search Appliance (discontinued) vs. IBM Watson Content Analytics

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.

Incentivized

If one is looking for a content crawling search engine (think "Google" but on your own private system), IBM Watson does a great job. It is also very good for locating duplicate files/folders and lost items. If document organization and searching is the goal, IBM Watson hits the nail on the head.

Incentivized

• Homes in on key searches.
• Immediate response.
• Simple UI, very user-friendly.

Incentivized

• Easy Interface - Drag and click based UI.
• Good amount of tools for visualization.
• Less amount of time taken to perform analysis.

Incentivized

• It's my understanding that Google is ending support for the appliance soon. This is obviously an important consideration.
• The administrator interface is far from easy to use.
• There is a significant learning curve for new users.

Incentivized

• The software is semi-limited to indexing and searching.
• Software does not force a specific "structure" as some document management systems do.

Incentivized

Neutral rating because I've never needed support.

Incentivized

Google search has always been superior. No other search engine application can even come close.

Incentivized

IBM Watson is not quite in the same category as Worldox or NetDocuments as both are full-fledged document management. However, both vendors provide a similar searching and indexing product. Worldox provides searching and indexing but the Indexer is somewhat prone to issues. IBM Watson does not have the stability/consistency issues. NetDocuments is cloud-hosted document management and its index does not seem to have issues. That being said, there is a large premium as the data is all stored in a cloud container with the management system.

Incentivized

• The GSA was not cheap. At all.
• 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.

Incentivized

• It has provided a positive work environment.
• Since its easy and understandable good amount of team communication improved.

Incentivized