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Moving on from GSA to Algolia

Author Elliott Gluck

 

Moving on from GSA to Algolia

With the sunsetting of Google Search Appliance (GSA) on the horizon, there has never been a better time to migrate to the speed, power, and flexibility of Algolia. Since many companies are thinking about switching off Google enterprise search, we wanted to outline some of the key differences between GSA and Algolia, whether large (goodbye hardware!) or small (our exposed relevance logic by default).

But before we jump into all the specifics, we want to better describe Algolia and the replacement options available to anyone looking to migrate – so let’s start with a bit about us. Algolia is a search API that gives developers a complete toolkit for building search & discovery experiences into their products. We are a global company with over 5,000 customers located in over 100 countries. Our goal is simple: to help companies across all industries create powerful, relevant and scalable discovery experiences for their users. We do this through our powerful hosted search API that provides product teams with the resources & tools they need to create fast & relevant search.

But will Algolia meet the rigorous requirements of your business when you’re used to the on-premise feature set Google Search Appliance provides? Here are a couple of the reasons why the answer is ‘Yes’:

  • Reliability – We know your business relies on search, and we stand behind our products with an available 99.999% uptime SLA with 1000x credit payback guarantee.
  • Scalability – Algolia effortlessly scales from your first record to millions of records with hosted infrastructure options that meet your business’s unique needs.
  • Relevance – Highly customizable and configurable relevance formula and intuitive user dashboard ensure that even non-technical teams are fully in control of search results.
  • Security – At Algolia, your data’s security is our top priority. Your data is always encrypted in transit, with available encryption at rest and dedicated infrastructure options on 6 continents.

However, we recognize not everyone might be ready to make the full jump from GSA’s on-premise solution straight to Algolia’s enterprise API’s. For these cases where indexing content using our APIs is not an option we also offer Algolia Custom Crawler, which automatically extracts any content directly from your website, turning it into structured data to make it easily searchable.

Using a crawler should not impact site search quality. One of our key differences is that we help our customers decide on the best search experience for their users and customize the crawler accordingly. Our customers can then leverage the relevance logic of Algolia that is transparent and completely configurable. In addition, our tie breaking algorithm allows you to choose what attributes to make searchable and rank according to your importance rating. Furthermore, to deliver the most relevant results to your users, our Custom Crawler can be extended beyond your pages to enrich your index with metrics from Google Analytics. If you’re interested about learning more about our Custom Crawler, you can reach out directly to our sales team to get your questions answered immediately. We also offer the support of several solutions partners as part of our recently launched partner program offering transition services to ensure the success of your Google Search Appliance migration.

Still unsure which GSA replacement option is right for you? We have more information that will help provide further specifics as well as an upcoming webinar you can register for where we will walk through the Algolia product live.

“Algolia makes the lives of all of our customers easier – and our lives easier, too. We were up and running on 3 different properties within 3 weeks thanks to the ease of development they provide.”

Anne Obendorf
Digital Content Manager
Couchbase