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Google Search Appliance [EOL] vs Microsoft FAST comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Search Appliance [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft FAST
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (8th)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech Support Staff at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Fast and efficient enterprise search application with query support in 40 different languages
A very good enterprise search application. Search results are produced pretty fast and the contents gets re-index quite often which ensures that the search results are not stale. The Administrative Interface is very easy to use and has a lot of useful information. The number of pages crawled by google search appliance is quite high compared other tools in the same domain. Another good feature of Google search appliance is that, the search index keeps getting updated for every update to any doc and removal of any doc actual clears the corresponding entry in the search index ensuring that non-existent entries don't show up in the results page. Search results can be grouped in various collections e.g. university collections, medical collections etc. Google Search Appliance very smartly handles the synonyms, as can be seen in the "narrow your search" feature. Indexing of content can be easily configured by specifying URLs
reviewer1466883 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Robust solution with good value
Microsoft FAST is quite robust. Our clients are quite happy with it. For other users who already have a solution in place, we recommend Microsoft FAST because it is more compatible and you can organize the solution with Microsoft components. If you are with any other third party, there could be a chance that the required output is not what you would expect. But with Microsoft, it will work better. It is compatible with the older generation systems, so you can offer it. On a scale of one to ten, I would give Microsoft FAST an eight because I'm quite comfortable with it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Good for enterprise search."
"A very good enterprise search application with a good administrative user interface which is intuitive and easy to use."
"Microsoft FAST is a really amazing search application."
"Microsoft FAST is quite robust. Our clients are quite happy with it."
"Microsoft FAST is quite robust, our clients are quite happy with it, and for other users who already have a solution in place, we recommend Microsoft FAST because it is more compatible and you can organize the solution with Microsoft components."
 

Cons

"Can't customize algorithm. Little bit black box because you can't customize search algorithm."
"The ordering of search result is quite random and it is often seen that the most relevant search result is not shown in the top, which is quite confusing."
"If there is any change in a system or a configuration or an update, we might face some issues."
"We do get support from Microsoft, but the response is quite slow."
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Also Known As

No data available
MS FAST
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

British Airways, City of Calgary, Discovery Channel, Emerson Process Management, FINRA, GoDaddy.com, Hayneedle, Hays, Honeywell Aerospace, Honeywell Transportation, Posco, Soci_t_ G_n_rale Group
Moffitt Cancer Center, Hitachi Solutions, Manupatra Information Solutions, Unique World, _KODA AUTO a.s., MindTree Ltd, Mississippi Department of Transportation
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic, Glean, Coveo and others in Indexing and Search. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.