Last week, after giving a keynote on the current and future of Enterprise Search at the Online Information conference in London, the first question asked of me was, "Why shouldn't I just get Google? It's what my boss thinks is best." My fellow search analyst Adriaan Bloem and I probably get this question more than any other. Well, while speaking with Google Search Appliance (GSA) customers as part of the research for the 2008 Enterprise Search Report, we found that once customers reached the limits of the appliance, they were pretty much stuck. The GSA lacks the advanced tuning controls found in many other Enterprise Search products, so customers hit walls when:

• indexing heterogeneous document stores
• attempting to adhere to complex, document-level security requirements
• collecting non-web-based, and in particular, SharePoint-based information

As you would expect, Google disagrees with our analysis. We think their marketing is ahead of their technology. You can read more about why the GSA isn't all wine and roses in today's press release, or in-depth in our Report.