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Has anyone here looked at the Google Search Box for SharePoint? We're looking into it as part of our MOSS deployment since we also use Google's GSA, and I'm personally not impressed with it, while a colleague seems to think that it's the only option we should be using, or even considering.

While I've got no problems with the GSA indexing our SharePoint content, the Search Box just seems clumsy. It looks horrible, the results being returned are much more limited than what I get if I use the GSA search page itself, configuring it has been nothing but a PITA and it's still only got a basic config ans isn't respecting things like user permissions or search scopes that the default SharePoint Indexer and search controls handle out of the box.

What are your guys thoughts? Am I being overly critical, and should just spend more time trying to configure it? Are you using a split-personality with it yourself, where you have the GSA for enterprise wide search, but use SharePoint for local searches? Other thoughts?

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closed as too localized by sysadmin1138♦ Feb 12 at 3:22

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The Google Search Appliance really does not kick into gear until you have people searching. I.e. we could not even set what language to use and had to wait until a number of searches were done then it "clicked" and changed from American to real English.

Whatever you do, keep only the one search for everything. The "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two is never quite sure" applies here.

As far as I know the Google Appliance is a black box and you don't really do too much configuration of the search itself.

SharePoint search (which I like) allows several ways of messing with the results if you don't like it.

However, it really comes down to a cost/benefit approach. If you already have the little blue box in the datacentre, it may pay to use it.

For my money, the SharePoint search has it over the GSA in results quality and search benefits.

GSA does allow you to include options to ignore menus and the like from search results using html comments that does not appear in the SharePoint search.

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Thanks for your thought Nat. However, my question was concerning the Search Box that Google supplies for SharePoint, rather than the GSA itself. – Evan M. Feb 11 '10 at 17:18
Hmmm, no knowledge of how that works exactly sorry. – Nat Feb 11 '10 at 20:08
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We scrapped our GSA(mini) install for several reasons.

  1. Absurdly difficult setup.
  2. Doesn't care about permissions.

Needless to say, integrating that into Sharepoint makes no sense to me when Sharepoint search is easy to setup and does care about permissions.

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