Google Search Appliance (GSA)

Does anyone have any insight or experience working with Google Search Appliance as a search solution for your company's intranet? We are investigating it now for our intranet to replace our existing search tool - Verity. I wonder how well it performs, and if the lack of customization options limits your ability to customize the results to fit best to your needs. Or, is it that good to do it automatically that you don't need any customization.

Any first-hand experience feedback greatly appreciated.

 

I've used it some. The lack of customization options was never a problem ... it worked just like the Google online search. The biggest problem I saw was security, it's not well suited to customize access permissions by user/role ... at least it wasn't about a year ago when we were reviewing it.

 

Thanks Anita, I am glad to hear about customization not being a problem. Cool.

Talking with Google engineers and reading their material, they have beefed up their security model. Now, they say they integrate with your existing access control system to provide document-level security. They use single-sign on, they can use LDAP, basic and NTLM authentication, PKI with X509 certs, and uses SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) - so they say... now I am looking for someone who actually implemented it in the big enterprise.

Thanks again for your input.

 

I wish I could get a feedback from those who tried it before. I'm going to propose to my company.