vincevincevince - 1:15 am on Nov 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

Perhaps WebmasterWorld's search solution has finally arrived? The Google Appliance range has always put me off due to the usage volume limitations.

I see two naturally competitive models in this market; (a) retailers of essentially similar systems who sell only software to install on your own hardware, and (b) web-based services which are able to crawl and index internal pages through authentication.

With the rush-to-the-bottom we tend to see in this market, as it commoditises further I would be surprised if there aren't robust open-source platforms along the lines of (a) above. Finally, if Google notices people using the Microsoft Search Server then they will like-as-not open up their hosted solutions under model (b) to recapture eyeballs.