Advantages of hosted search engines [closed]

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I've been looking into hosted search solutions such as Indextank and Google CSE. This is my first time to integrate one into my website. The only advantage I can think of in using one is decreased usage of my server's database.

What could possibly be other advantages?

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In the case of IndexTank, you get the advantages of running your own search server while not having to worry about the operation. It's free up to 100k documents so if you're below that threshold the advantage is obvious.

If you're going to pay for the service, you should weigh the cost of your own time maintaining your service (which will probably more significant than your server costs) vs the cost of a hosted service.

Keep in mind that Google CSE is not hosted search, they crawl your site so you don't have real-time updates/deletes or custom sorting. You do get a very simple javascript that adds search for your html pages that Google can crawl.

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Fewer queries hitting your database may not be insignificant, but there are additional advantages to using a search engine.

Most search engines offer superior search relevancy and often much improved speed over in database full text search. A search engine such as ElasticSearch will also give you access to many advanced features and superior ways of describing the information you or your users wishes to acquire.

You may host ElasticSearch yourself or use a hosted solution. Found Search is a great hosted ElasticSearch service.

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Google Custom Search provides additional capabilities, such as:

• autocomplete - when restricting search by site(s)
• synonym specification - if autocomplete discovery isn't robust enough
• categories - after you enter a search term you can filter queries by topic
• images - showing images in your search results
• promotions - specifying links based on queries, e.g., think integrating FAQs or products with queries

Some of these functions are enabled in the mobile app custom search engine at https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=partner-pub-3989641269425886:5048880850#gsc.tab=0

One of the important things you lose with Google Custom Search is the ability to return more than 100 results. For instance, if you run a large site with thousands of relevant results, Google CSE will return no more than 100 of these results. That can be good or bad depending on your objectives.