Discontinuation of Google Search Appliance- Finding the best Alternative.

Google has announced that it will discontinue the Google Search Appliance (GSA). No new systems can be purchased. Resellers and partners can sell one-year license renewals for existing systems through 2017, to end in 2018.
Google will continue to fix bugs, provide security updates and continue support until that date. Some support licenses will remain in effect through 2019.
Google is setting priorities as the company prepares to push Google cloud more aggressively

What is Google Search Appliance

Google Search Appliance(GSA) is one of the leading enterprise search engines.The Google Search Appliance is a rack-mounted device providing document indexing functionality.
The operating system is based on CentOS. The software is produced by Google and the hardware is manufactured by Dell and current generations are based on Dell's PowerEdge R710.The appliance runs as a server inside or outside your network. It does the work of indexing documents and other stuff by "crawling" your company resources for data so users can locate it using the same search methods offered on the Google Search site. This may include websites, file shares and databases. You can configure the type and location of your data to ensure only appropriate content is shown to users. Reporting capabilities can show you how your employees are using the appliance so you can get the best results from it.

Cost- GSA price depends on number of documents, According to some online sources starting from 500K documents it costs you about $1000 per month up front for 3 years."

What are the replacement for Google Search Appliance(GSA)-

Cloud Based Alternatives-
ex- Google Cloud-
This can be more cost effective as it follows subscription model, much faster and little internal IT support is required. The major issue this alternative is the data restrictions that many companies have for Government Projects. These projects have clauses that don't allow for processing of data outside the network or on cloud. Commercial Market solutions-
ex- Coveo Enterprise Search, Endeca Guided Search, EXALEAD CloudView,IBM Infosphere Data Explorer-
These are the available enterprise search engine alternatives to GSA. These are established market products. Each product offers its own specialization and organizations can select one based on their needs.

Open Source Based solutions-
Creating your own open soource search network using Elastic Search or Solr. This way the organization can create a more customized search engine for the organization. All the data will be within the firewall. The major problem is this may require more efforts on part of the organization to gather requirements and implement it.

See Also

Apache Solr 6 Hello World Tutorial- Getting Started with Apache Solr 6