While Google is the number one name in search outside your firewall, is it a good fit for your company?
We get this question a lot. Some companies have already purchased a GSA (Google Search Appliance) and are hoping we can give them a reason to use it. Others are looking to add "power" to their search thinking that throwing Google into the mix adds horsepower and speed to their company portal. This conversation is usually sparked by an enormous store of documents out on a network drive.
After several of these types of discussions, our typical answer usually will be… keep it simple. If you want to increase the power of your search and adding a new server (either hardware or a VM) is an option, it usually makes more sense to beef up key roles in the SharePoint farm (like the index server) and skip bringing in another piece of hardware and technology.
Better yet, migrate the content off that big drive and into SharePoint. While the Google appliance uses a brute force approach to indexing documents developed searching the web, SharePoint gives you a lot more control and precision. This is especially true when you set up your Meta data (content types and site columns) correctly.
But what if you have lots of documents (1 TB+), is it time to bring in Google? Won't your SharePoint farm collapse?
A year ago SharePoint was limited on how much it could search and how much it could hold. But between Microsoft's new search products like FAST and other SharePoint enhancing products like StoragePoint, things have changed dramatically. FAST be included in SharePoint 2010. Today there are very few reasons for adding the additional headaches (for you and us) that come with mixing technologies.
So for most solutions we encounter… SharePoint Search wins.