Built-in SF4 Search vs. Google Search Appliance

We are an association transitioning our website to SF4 from a very old CMS.  One of the goals is to organize our intellectual content in part using the search function.  That is, we have a variety of content in different areas: newsletters, dictionaries, journals, a bi-monthly magazine, newsletters, website content and more.  Rather than getting a search-relevant dump of links and descriptions from a search, we want logically organized results: dictionary definition (if available), Body of Knowledge content, magazine articles, journal artickes, website content, etc.

Our goal is not only to provide our members with slick relevant results, but encourage non-members to join and provide other seekers with a taste of our deep stores of content (some of which could be purchased).

We currently have a license and the hardware to the Google Search Appliance, however our implementation is mostly out of the box with only some tweaks to look and feel and use of keyword features and such.  I can't find any implementation of the GSA like what I'm describing above. Could the built-in Sitefinity search be the path to give us what we want, or is our GSA the tool to get us there?  Are there existing search plugins available for this.

We would expect to hire a developer for this but I would like to provide some preliminary thoughts. 

Thanks,

Chris

Hello Chris Carrier,

Sitefinity uses the Lucene.NET search engine for indexing of content and searching withing the indexes. At the moment our built in search indexing service is indexing static content of your pages, and it also has the ability to index content items (news, events, etc.), this content is not part of the static HTML of pages. We also have API for creating custom search indexes using the Lucene engine, so that if you have custom content types, or custom modules you will be able to include it in search indexes. More information on the topic can be found here.

You can use the GSA, however as far as I know it indexes the HTML output of your pages, so you will need to run crawlers on your website, where in Sitefinity we do not use a crawler but directly get the content from the data storage.

All the best,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team