HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. Luigi's Box

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Recognising synonyms and mis-spellings to still show our customers accurate and relevant search results.
• Great analytics section showing trending searches and non-converting searches, aiding in future product development and our priorities for what products we want to show the customer.
• The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• More choice for customisation and layout would be good.
• More payment options for example the choice to pay via direct debit.

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

As I mentioned in the previous points, Luigis Box helped us to improve the overall services for our customers, whether in the area of ​​product search, optimization of various processes, improvement of service quality, etc. Within our company, all of us who work with him are really satisfied with him. If we were to recommend the tool we use to other companies, Luigi's Box would be a clear choice for us :)

Their support is excellent. Quick and helpful.

The price is a lot better than Clerk, and the speed of integration is much simpler. Our IT team had so many issues intergating Clerk and the price kept on increasing. Whereas with Luigi's Box it was the exact opposite. Price is good for the system you receive and the integration is easy.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Simple construction of a data feed = low cost
• Easy to implement with the provided script - without having to hire a programmer
• The search results presented after minor configuration are much better than in search engines built into SaaS e-commerce