Search
Top considerations when migrating off Google’s popular site search engine
If you’re still using Google Site Search or Google Custom Search Engine — the former was retired and the latter now includes ads — it’s a great time to move to a new search engine. The good news is that site search solutions have come a long way and provide search functionality that far exceeds GSS and GCSE.
Google Site Search (GSS) and Google Custom Search Engine (GCSE) were very popular products for businesses to use to add search on their sites. However, GSS was retired a few years ago and GCSE began to promote Adsense ads over customers’ search results.
If you’re still using one or the other, it’s a great time to move to a newer site search engine. The good news is that site search solutions have come a long way and provide search functionality that far exceeds GSS and GCSE.
Which GSS alternative is best to switch to? What considerations should you have when migrating from GSS to a new site search engine? We’ll explore those questions and more below.
Before you migrate from Google Site Search to something else, you need to decide how to host your new search solution. Let’s talk about the options briefly.
Software as a service (SaaS) is arguably the most popular option for building new search experiences. In many ways, SaaS offers the best of all worlds. SaaS benefits include:
SaaS solutions (like Sajari!) are built on elastic infrastructure that can scale with the business’ needs. For developers, SaaS services typically include a robust set of APIs or plugins for integrating search with your site or business metrics, and are easy to extend across domains and search collections.
See our Site Search Buyer’s Guide for 2021 for finding a SaaS search provider.
AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, and other cloud providers offer site search engines that are tightly coupled with their platforms. Cloud solutions like Amazon CloudSearch, Azure Cognitive Search, and Google Cloud Search offer some elasticity and flexibility, but they also demand higher maintenance and support.
Whereas SaaS solutions are all-inclusive, cloud users need to answer questions such as:
Whether you choose SaaS or cloud for replacing Google Site Search, what features are important to you? What is a must have and what’s a nice-to-have?
One of the best things about Google Site Search was it’s no-hassle convenience for developers and user experience for website visitors! Simply copy a code snippet, add it to your website, and voila, you have Google search on your site.
There are scores of features in modern site search products. While we can’t cover all of them, we’ve identified ten of the big search features to consider for reaching feature parity when you migrate from Google Site Search.
Site search engines need to crawl all the text, images, links, and metadata on your site to make sense of it. Today’s search engines go well beyond building a reverse index. Nowadays search engines must also develop a semantic understanding of your site to build semantic search.
Site Search Heath: See how well your site is optimized (SEO) for site search crawlers
Semantic query understanding is critical to how a search engine performs. To match the power and capabilities of Google Site Search, you should select a solution that provides full-text crawling and builds a robust semantic understanding of your site’s content.
It’s also important that, when you make edits to your site or add new static or dynamic content, your crawler indexes the new content as close to real-time as possible.
Available both as a free open source download or fully-hosted through Elastic or other providers (including AWS), there’s a large number of options for getting a project started. Elasticsearch is a great fit for logging and analytics projects, but less so for a “pure” search engine use case such as site search or ecommerce search where it’s overly complex and requires a tremendous amount of expertise.
Your search box or search bar needs to fit into your site’s design. When evaluating GSS replacements, have a look at whether the new solution offers a way to customize the HTML/CSS of the search bar to match your site’s design.
In addition, you may want to evaluate a site search tool for whether it’s also designed for accessibility (this is critical for government and education sites and increasingly required for most businesses), which begins with the search box.
How do you want users to interact with your site search? By default, most businesses require users to enter a complete search query, hit return, and then view results. However, search autocomplete is how Google has worked for more than a decade. It provides instant results and, using fuzzy search, can help correct for typos or misspellings as users are typing.
Nowadays too there are other options, such as instant search which displays results with previews.
Do you have users typing queries or looking for results in different languages? If so, you will want to find an on-site search replacement that supports multi-language search such as all the Latin-based languages as well as double-byte characters for languages such as Chinese or Japanese.
If your site has PDF or DOCX files, you may want to find a Google Site Search alternative that indexes the content inside of those documents and the document metadata. You should have the flexibility to determine which files are included or excluded from a search (see Rules below).
You say “sneakers,” I say “running shoes.” Your users are typing in search terms that may be different from how your content is written. Google is very good at handling search synonyms and fuzzy search. So, too, are modern site search solutions which should at minimum offer a way to build a synonym library.
Like Google Analytics, your new on-site search engine should give you insights into search trends, which searches contributed to site conversion (signups, downloads, purchases, etc.), and which searches are returning poor results. Built-in analytics are desirable, but if you use a third-party business intelligence or analytics service, you will want to be able to connect or export your search data there.
If you like how Google Site Search performs today, but find that your new search solution returns different results, you may want to create rules to manage results.
In general, rules come in two different types:
Rules can include things such as prioritizing certain types of content (such as blogs or documentation) or boosting certain results (such as top-selling products). Similarly, you may want to de-prioritize certain content.
Newer advances also allow automatic boosting of pages for specific queries or aggregations. For example if someone searches for “login”, this may be statistically more likely to be related to the “support” section of the site, therefore pages in that section will be prioritized automatically.
For all the above, you’ll want your new search provider to have a way to manage rules. It should ideally have ways to set general rules without having to write rules for every possible query. Bonus points if certain rules can also write themselves!
Do free — and ad-free — search engines still exist? And, how much should a premium search engine cost? Like Google Site Search, newer SaaS search solutions are typically priced on monthly volume — either the number of queries, number of indexed records, or both.
Maybe it goes without saying, but do not select a site search solution before testing it! You can even configure your new site search solution on a staging site to test the design and search results.
Now that you have some options and search functions in mind, it’s time to evaluate the available platforms. Switching to a new solution should be as painless as possible.
If you’re migrating off GSS or GCSE and looking for a better search solution, try Sajari. With built-in reinforcement learning, rules engine, spell correction, and more, Sajari has a user experience that feels a lot like GSS. It includes newer features, such as pipelines and a React SDK, to provide deep customization for any site, e-commerce store, or app. We’re biased in thinking it’s the best alternative to Google Site Search, but you can be the judge when you sign up for a free 14-day trial today!
Related reading:
No credit card required.
.svg)
.svg)
