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by papito 2383 days ago
Even Google's Search Appliance wasn't a game changer. Reality check - it's DEAD.

Google disrupted the market by factoring in links into its algorithm, something that is rather meaningless in proprietary context.
2 comments
occamsrazorwit 2383 days ago
I've heard from the industry that the issue with GSA was that it just wasn't that good. It tried to adapt Google's core search into a box, but Google's algorithm is only great because of scale. The box doesn't have as much of an opportunity to learn from user interactions and thus fails to meet expectations.
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crawdog 2383 days ago
The GSA "just worked". Also having the name recognition for public search did a lot to drive its enterprise popularity. It didn't have a lot of bells/whistles, but it addressed the commodity search problem well.

Agreed relevancy is a problem. PageRank works well for public content but internal search has plenty of relevancy problems. Having little control over this certainly hurt.

Managing on-prem hardware/appliances is a difficult business. I don't fault them for moving to a more scaleable model.

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