Google search appliances have more or less dominated the web arena for years! What if you had the option to switch to something that meets your requirements better? As more customers explore options to the Google Search appliance that currently power their intranet or website search, it is becoming clear to the corporate, non-profit or academic IT decision-makers that they could save a lot more money with an alternative like ‘SearchBlox’. It reduces space in their data centers by virtualizing the applications or move them to the cloud. So, is SearchBlox really a feasible alternative? Let’s compare and find out!
SearchBlox is priced at US$5,000 per server license for unlimited documents rather than the approximately US$35,000 for indexing unto 500K documents that Google Search Appliance costs. However the true cost also needs to factor in the support for the hardware including space, power and maintenance. In addition to the black box architecture of Google search appliance, support options are also limited. SearchBlox provides the ability of seamlessly moving away from the Google Search Appliance without skipping a beat in your intranet or website.
In addition to the cost-savings and feature comparison, scalability of the solution is something that you need to consider, given the explosion of documents and content in organizations. SearchBlox scales both vertically (by adding more CPU/RAM to the existing setup) and horizontally (by adding more search servers that can be run in a cluster) without disrupting your architecture. For Google administrators who have styled their search results with XSL, SearchBlox offers the same option to ensure there are no differences to the end user.
SearchBlox also provides a ready to use faceted search plugin that can be customized to match or improve the look and feel provided by the Google appliance. SearchBlox offers custom modules that can be setup to crawl content behind SSO authenticated portals or custom security schemes. SearchBlox allows you to index any number of websites, rss feeds, databases, filesystems or custom aggregated content on an unlimited document basis. The last thing you need to think about is how much content you have for search. To learn more on how to replace your Google Search Appliance, please contact SearchBlox (http://www.searchblox.com/)
