Microsoft Search Server (MSS) vs. Google Search Appliance (GSA)

Last week we were working on Google Search Application (GSA) to Microsoft Search Server(MSS) migration engagement for a client. The client in this case provides several hosted service and one of the key service they provide is to execute hosted search on behalf of their customers (Search as a Service if you will). The point of interest in this engagement was that the client was not evaluating GSA vs. MSS – they already had GSA running for some time and were considering moving to MSS. Now why would someone want to move away from a product that was developed by *Google*? Particularly when the product is Googles domain - Search.

The pain points around GSA as expressed by the client were:

1. GSA was extremely unstable, leading to downtime and perpetual Google support requirements.
2. Many a times Google support cannot fix the problem via remote diagnostics hence the client would have to ship the physical box back to Google. Duh!! Imagine the downtime management and hardware redundancy requirement if this happened frequently as in case of this client. (Google provides a physical box with GSA preinstalled on a locked down Linux box)
3. The only option for backup is the configuration file which can be exported to an XML file. However there is no disaster recovery option for the crawled index files. If the server crashes it takes the log files down with it. (this client had to crawl around 7-9 million URLs this could take a long time to re-index)
4. When Google makes any updates to the box, the client would have to re index the whole set of URLs again.
5. GSA has some problems crawling certain sites, hence does not index all the URLs specified in configuration.

Wow… imagine if you had to live with these issues.. would you choose GSA? Would one accept this type of a solution from a company like Google?

With GSA Google is treading in uncharted territory - the enterprise. Google does extremely well with their online model, thanks to many of its application being in the perpetual beta state and all products being hosted and managed online by Google customer never had any issues. But the enterprise - this is a different ball game the on premise model is one where Google cant play the perpetual beta cards. And then Google customer support - hmm not a very pleasant experience either. Makes you wonder does Google understand its customers?

On the other had Microsoft with MSS understands the enterprise, and MSS does not suffer from the same problems as GSA. The concern the client had with MSS was on search result relevancy provided by MSS. However initial MSS relevancy metrics (reciprocal relevancy, Precision @N etc) were promising. Does that mean MSS walks away with all the brownie points? Sadly no. The search space is something Google understands well and Google has build GSA with the intension that some of GSA clients will implement search as a service and hence have provided several capabilities that support this type of deployment out of the box (pure multitenant isolated indexing is not supported) however MSS doesn’t come out of the box with these capabilities – the primary limitation being that MSS supports only a single Shared Service Provider (SSP). If like its cousin MOSS, had MSS supported multiple SSPs thing would have been great. SSPs give you the capability of servicing all the hosted clients in a more multitenant manner (administration, provisioning, configuration, isolation – client specific requirements could not be met leveraging Search Scopes alone) and SSPs also allow you to scale better with different physical indexing server that can be assigned to individual logical SSPs and a more distributed index log file management (most of these capabilities are not in GSA right now). Its sad that Microsoft didn’t plan to include multiple SSP support for MSS. Were MS just plain shortsighted or was there a good reason not to include multiple SSPs in MSS? Either ways Microsofts SSP decision on MSS didn’t help this client. The client is now leaning towards the MOSS solution – though now the cost of implementation had gone up several folds since we are leveraging MOSS instead of MSS. Next stop – performance testing. The final test – if that goes well its hasta la vista to GSA.

Google being who they are will surely bounce back with a better/stable product and support, but that could take time even the mighty Google is vulnerable. In the meanwhile GSA isn’t getting a lot of word of mouth advertising from their existing customers and Microsoft is sure to leverage that. As with most things in life you don’t get a second chance to make the first impression :).