I suggest you catalog some of the weaknesses of the competitors’ search solutions. Should we start with Fast ESP? Autonomy? Endeca? One of the 300 others? The GOOG has more than 25,000 licensees and more customers trying to get the entitled ones to return phone calls, provide more information, take money. To my knowledge, this suggests a strong wind behind the GOOG and tough sailing for those wanting to sink Googzilla’s ship.

Stephen Arnold, January 6, 2009

Don’t be blinded by Google.com’s sexy moniker, advertising-based financials and page-ranking algorithm. If you’ve bothered to talk to any Google GSA enterprise search customers over the last 2-3 years, you;ll hear the same story repeated over and over again…
- Painful self-service support options
- GSA is unable to be restored from backup
- GSA’s connector story is ridiculous (requires discrete stand-alone Tomcat instances on separate HW for each connector)

Most large enterprise GSA customers are NOT happy with the solution they knee-jerk bought 2-3 years ago to replace Verity or Autonomy and they are routinely replacing Google GSA with better next gen ES solutions on the market from all your favorite pet vendors in this market.

So please – enough with the Google worship. Google is, after all, a dysfunctional band of pompous SAT-obsessed brats in bainstorming sessions bickering over private pet projects that never lead to any real search breakthroughs in production. But they’ve got a great cafeteria and foosball setup.