Replacement strategy for Google Search Appliance?

September 28, 2015 #webdev #search

During the introductions of an internal Search Experience Community meeting, a product was mentioned that uses the Google Search Appliance (GSA) and was looking to move off of that platform onto Elastic.

Some of our products also use a GSA for searching HTML based “Help” content. The Technical Communications team authors this content and it is deployed as static content to a web server that is indexed by GSA. This is technology I haven’t used before, but my understanding is that custom tags are used to control content indexing (see 7.0 - Preparing for a Crawl ):

<!--googleoff: all-->

<!--googleon: all-->

Searching the internet indicates using a web crawler (e.g., Apache Nutch) and applying a filter that respects the GSA custom tags could prepare the documents to be inserted into Elastic.

This seems like a topic where a common solution or platform service could be useful. We are thinking that Help might just be included in the single UI search box experience - possibly part of federated results, and keyed by detecting “How do I…” style questions. This is a longer-term goal, but it seems like a relevant topic for an overall search experience audience.