Overview

The Side-by-Side search comparison tool compares search results from the Google Search Appliance or Google Site Search alongside results from any other search engine or alternate appliance or Site Search configurations. Allow your users themselves to vote on which set of search results they like best!

For instance, you could compare:

• The results coming back from 2 different GSAs.
• You might want to do this if you had a development GSA with version 6.0 and you wanted to compare it to your existing GSA which has version 5.2.
• You might want to do this if one GSA had crawled far more content and you wanted to see how this improved search quality.
• The results coming back from two different Front Ends of the same GSA.
• You might want to compare how the different front end settings (such as query expansion settings, biasing settings, etc.) affect the search results.
• You might want to compare which front end users prefer.
• The results coming back from two different collections on the same GSA.
• The results of your current website search vs. Google Site Search (we bet that Google Site Search wins every time. ;-))
• The results of any other enterprise search service vs. the Google Search Appliance
• And many others.

Features

1. Voters can vote on which side (i.e. policy) they prefer and they are automatically taken to the next query
2. Tool can be seeded with queries of your choice (for instance, the top 100 queries of your company) or voters can enter their own query at any time
3. Administrators can use a simple web-based tool to easily configure multiple policies and set up multiple tests
4. After voters have voted on the policies, tool will let you know which policy received the most votes, the probabilities and confidence intervals that any given policy is actually better than the other, and whether there is enough data for the comparison to be statistically significant.
5. Tool can randomize which set of results shows up on which side so that users don't get biased after many votes.
6. Voters can login and see their vote history and even change previous votes.

Example

Please join the Google Enterprise Labs Discussion Forum after you download the software so we can keep you up-to-date on new versions and bug fixes as they are released. You can also use the forum to ask questions, hear about new experiments that are coming, and suggest ideas for new experiments!