Anyone implemented Endeca with .NET? Would you recommend Endeca or FAST?

Question

Which search engine would you recommend for a Commerce website?

We have millions of products in a catalog and we want it to be as quick as possible.

We would also want to make sure that the marketing driven through the search engine will be fast and effective.

What are your opinions?

Answer 1

This is only half the answer to your question. I've used it with Java and not .NET. Fast is said to be the better search engine. I don't know. However for Commerce Endeca is considered to be the best. I've used it with a catalog of 5Mil. products and queries are very very fast. If you use .NET or Java does not matter in the end solution the Search Engine stays the same. And what search engine to be used is not answered easily. it all depends on what you want/can spend. My experiences with Endeca are very positive.

Answer 2

I have been involved in several .NET implementations of Endeca and have been happy every time. The biggest advantage of Endeca over FAST is the cost and time of implementation.

My recommendation is to document your requirements and send out an RFP. Make sure you include the following as part of the RFP:

• A demo of the proposed solution (make sure they clearly explain within the Demo what features are included in the cost of the proposal and what features cost extra).

• Examples of existing customers that have implemented this solution on top of the same commerce software you are using.

• Software Licensing cost (you will need to provide details about the number of records you have in your commerce catalog as both companies price based on this)

• A detailed list of available modules / plugins and their respective costs.

• Implementation cost.

• Implementation schedule.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Endeca is the best commercial product in my own honest opinion. We've been using it for our millions of catalogs data.

Or you can try Lucene.NET

Answer 4

Can anyone provide an idea of cost for Endeca (along with the high-level scope of their project)?

Answer 5

We've been using Endeca for several .NET ecommerce website, surely I think it give us faster full text search with little coding in compare with SQL Server, but Endeca is over complexity, it cost us lots of time to update and configure. Its query capability is quite limited, it lacks of flexibility as we get used to with SQL query.

I'm going to reduce Endeca dependency by utilize Lucene.Net for search part.