Google Search Appliances versus Microsoft Enterprise Search (FAST) [closed]

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I am .NET developer and I have been working with various search providers but Google Search Appliance/Mini has been always the best fit for requirements when implementing enterprise level search. I have not worked yet on Microsoft Enterprise Search so I would like to hear developers experiences on it.

These days I am getting a lot Enterprise Search sales propaganda from Microsoft telling me that FAST is really great. Does Microsoft have products like Google Mini (cheaper, limited API) and Google Search Appliance (expensive enterprise with API)?

If we take all sales talk out of it and just look these two products side-by-side what are advantages for developers and on Microsoft Enterprise Search when comparing to Google Enterprise solution?

Update: I was searching some more info in this subject and it seems that 开发者_StackOverflowFAST is really focusing more on unstructured data where Google Appliance is more for searching web/intranet pages. Is this true?

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It is a bit unfair to compare the two since they are segmenting different types of users.

GSA (Google) is targted to companies that want a simple experiance for indexing their web and database hosted content. It is possible to index other systems as long as the data can be exposed in the form of a Google feed. So once the data is in a format that Google understands, it applies the Google technology to determine how best to index that document.

FAST is at the other end of the spectrum. It works with all the same types of data sources (structured - DBA and unstructured - Web/Documents). However FAST allows you to have fine grained control on how the data is processed and inserted into the Index.

So if you need to control the indexing process FAST is your friend. It allows you to define fields, map properties into these fields and then gives you a powerful query API (via HTTP) to search that content.

FAST also provides an extremely scalable product because of the way it divides the index up. Google does not provide this level of control because it is a "black box" (actually Yellow Box ;) ).

The Query API is very similar between Google and FAST. They both use HTTP to craft the query and return the result.

My advice if you are happy with the Google experiance then stay with it. If you are not happy and really want to control the processing workflow or need to scale up then go with FAST.