Site searching, auto completion

Question

We are building a site that will have a "knowledge centre", that section will contain pdf documents, videos and links to other pages.

We want to add a search feature that will be able to give auto-suggestions/phrase-completion based on the documents, videos and page links.

My first though was to use Lucene, but having a tight deadline someone suggested Google Site Search.

We are using Grails.

How effective will Google site search be? Should Lucene rather be used?

Also, google-cse v2 doesn't allow for onSearchComplete callbacks (as opposed to v1). We have a requirement that if no results are found, it should redirect to a different page.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I've done a project using Google Search and another using Solr so I can help you to choose:

Google Search

• Your site need to be online somewhere so that google bot can index it.
• Your SEO should be good enough.
• The index is built automatically based on page rule (meta name "robot").
• You can provide a sitemap with all pages you want to index.
• Nice backend where you can manage the indexation.
• You need to learn the API a bit if you want to customize search pages layout.
• It's not a free service (starting at 100$ per year for 20 000 queries).

Solr

• You have to index your site yourself (but as you control your indexing you have a better control of the content indexed.)
• Then you have to keep the index up-to-date.
• Easy to customize (you can display search result as you want).
• Nice feature included (suggestions, auto-completion,...)
• It's free.

To sum up if you are on a tight schedule Google site search can be faster to implement at first but Solr is much more customizable and free.