The Importance and Complexity of Advanced Onsite Search Tools
The enterprise search universe is crowded—with tools like Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Algolia, and Solr promising powerful results. But many of these platforms come with a steep cost: heavy infrastructure, niche expertise, and significant ongoing maintenance. While search is proven to boost engagement, drive conversions, and reduce support load, most internal teams lack the resources to build and sustain it. For many organizations, simply delivering fast, relevant content discovery can balloon into a six-figure annual expense. Let’s explore options in enterprise site search.
Our world-class enterprise search cuts infrastructure costs by up to 40% compared to Elasticsearch or Algolia—without compromising on speed, accuracy, or scale. Designed for developers and product teams alike, Searchcraft delivers powerful, production-ready search with zero backend complexity. Explore Searchcraft and deploy mission-critical search in hours, not weeks.
Enterprise search software (also known as site search or vertical search tools) is technology that enables organizations to index and search their own content with Google-like ease. In practice, it powers the search bars on your websites, apps, or internal portals – delivering relevant results from your data, not the whole web. Whether it’s helping shoppers find products on an e-commerce site or employees retrieve information from an intranet, enterprise search solutions are purpose-built to surface the right answers within a specific domain. This could mean a SaaS company indexing its help center articles, a publisher making years of archives instantly searchable, or a manufacturer enabling quick lookup across technical documents. In short, enterprise search software provides fast, accurate search focused on your content, with the flexibility to handle industry-specific use cases that generic search engines can’t.
Contact the Searchcraft crew and start planning your mission. Time is critical as every second presents new opportunity.
We exist in an era of information overload and sky-high user expectations, having a robust enterprise search is mission-critical. Here’s why investing in great search technology pays off, backed by data:
Search engine referral traffic is increasingly volatile—and increasingly unreliable. Nearly 60% of Google searches now end in zero clicks, meaning users either get their answers directly from Google's Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or give up entirely. For organizations, this signals a major shift: you can no longer depend on Google to send traffic your way or carry the burden of content discovery. To keep users engaged and in your ecosystem, you need to own your search experience—and make it fast, relevant, and on-brand.
Relevance drives engagement. Specialized search tends to deliver far more pertinent results, thus building user retention. Forrester research indicates vertical search can be up to 50% more relevant to users’ queries than a generic search engine. In other words, a tailored search experience (e.g. within your site or app) often understands your user’s intent better, surfacing content that generic engines might bury.
Search boosts conversions. A great search experience isn’t just a “nice-to-have” – it directly impacts the bottom line. Studies show implementing advanced enterprise search can boost conversion rates by 30% on average. In one analysis, simply optimizing site search led to a 43% jump in conversion rates. When users quickly find the products or info they seek, they’re far more likely to become customers.
Speed is critical for engagement. Slow search results can sink user interest. Even a 1-second delay can significantly reduce engagement – Google observed a 20% traffic drop from just a 0.5s slowdown in delivering results. In practice, this means every second counts: fast, relevant results keep users on your site, while laggy searches drive them away (and can slash conversions).
Support burden drops with better search. Empowering users to self-serve answers through effective search directly reduces strain on support teams. Companies have seen up to 40% fewer support tickets after deploying advanced enterprise search tools that help users find solutions on their own. Fewer “I can’t find X” tickets and repetitive FAQs mean lower support costs and happier customers.
Enterprise search matters because it keeps modern users engaged (who otherwise won’t hesitate to abandon a slow or irrelevant search), improves business metrics like sales and retention, and even cuts operational costs. It’s the secret weapon to turn information overload into opportunity.
Enterprise search isn’t one-size-fits-all – and that’s a good thing. It’s a versatile tool that can be deployed across a galaxy of scenarios
Building an enterprise-grade search is no small feat. Let’s briefly chart the landscape of popular enterprise search tools and where they fall short, to understand how Searchcraft charts a new course:
These sometimes-open-source engines (and their cloud incarnations) have long dominated enterprise search. They are powerful, but also notoriously complex to manage. Written in Java and originally designed for log analysis, Elastic requires significant tuning, cluster management, and hardware to perform well for content search. Scaling an Elasticsearch cluster can become an expensive journey – more nodes, more memory – and it demands in-house expertise to avoid performance pitfalls. OpenSearch (Amazon’s fork of Elastic) carries the same operational overhead. In short, these “heavyweight” solutions often overwhelm teams that just want effective site search without devoting a squad of backend engineers to babysit it.
Another veteran, Solr is built on the Lucene library like Elastic. It’s reliable for certain use cases but has a steep learning curve. Solr’s configuration (schema definitions, relevancy tuning, etc.) is infamously intricate, and implementing advanced features (e.g. geospatial search, complex faceting) can be cumbersome. It’s a “DIY toolkit” that gives you flexibility at the cost of significant setup time and maintenance. For many modern agile teams, Solr ends up feeling like legacy tech – requiring too much effort to bend into a real-time, application-facing search unless you have specialist talent.
On the opposite end, Algolia offers a cloud-hosted search service with a slick developer experience and speed. It’s great for quick integration and has features like instant search as you type. The catch? Cost. Algolia’s pricing skyrockets as your records or query volumes grow – something painfully noted by many startups. It charges per records and operations, meaning a sudden traffic spike or a bot scraping your site can send your bill through the roof. While Algolia shines in ease-of-use, that convenience comes at a premium (many teams find themselves paying tens of thousands per month for large apps). If you have a large catalog or user base, Algolia can become a budget black hole.
These are newer, lightweight search engines (Typesense in C++ and Meilisearch in Rust) that aim to provide an open-source alternative to Algolia. They are simpler to deploy than Elastic/Solr and offer good performance for smaller datasets. Some companies find success with them to avoid Algolia’s costs . However, they may lack certain enterprise-grade features. For instance, Typesense prioritizes pure speed with in-memory indices (limiting dataset size unless you scale up RAM), and while Meilisearch is developer-friendly, it’s still evolving in areas like fine-grained relevancy tuning, authentication, or distributed scaling. These tools can be fantastic for mid-tier needs but might struggle at scale without substantial custom work.
Legacy solutions either burden you with operational complexity (Elastic/Solr) or steep costs (Algolia), and some newer tools trade off advanced capabilities for simplicity. Many enterprises end up stitching together stopgap solutions – or limping along with an inadequate search because the “big” solutions are too unwieldy. Searchcraft was built to change this. It combines the best of both worlds (high performance and ease of use) without the usual trade-offs, giving you a modern option beyond the legacy stalwarts.
What Makes Searchcraft the Best Enterprise Search Software?
Searchcraft travels beyond another search tool to a re-imagined enterprise search solution built from the ground up to address the pain points legacy platforms haven’t. Searchcraft stands out as the best enterprise search software for forward-thinking teams.
At its core, Searchcraft is written in Rust, a systems language known for high performance and memory safety. This isn’t just tech trivia – it means Searchcraft’s engine delivers extremely low-latency query responses and high throughput. Unlike Java-based search servers from the ‘90s, our modern Rust architecture lets you handle massive query volumes without timeouts. The result is faster, more accurate search results that delight users. Under the hood, Searchcraft employs advanced algorithms (BM25 ranking, intelligent caching, etc.) to ensure that the most relevant content rockets to the top of results.
Because of its efficiency, Searchcraft can do more with less, drastically reducing infrastructure requirements for the same or better performance versus running Elasticsearch or Algolia. In practice, that means significant cost savings – smaller cloud bills, and not having to over-provision for peak traffic. Our engine’s optimization and efficient indexing make your finance team as happy as your dev team. You get light-speed search without needing Google-sized server farms.
Searchcraft offers the best of both worlds. Use our managed cloud service for convenience or deploy it on-premises/in your private cloud for full control. We recognize enterprise needs vary – whether for compliance, data residency, or preference to self-host – so we built Searchcraft to be cloud-agnostic. Our downloadable version can be up and running on your own infrastructure in minutes, and it’s the same high-performance engine that powers our cloud. This flexibility means you’re never locked in – you can even start on our cloud and move on-prem (or vice-versa) seamlessly.
Unlike legacy search tools that require extensive backend integration, Searchcraft was designed for front-end developers in mind. We provide polished SDKs so you can drop powerful search into your application with a few lines of code. No need to become a search expert or write complex server queries – the SDKs handle the heavy lifting, from querying to displaying results with pre-built UI components. This means faster integration (often hours instead of weeks). We also offer a robust API and support for other languages via our API, so whatever your stack, Searchcraft plugs in easily.
Managing search doesn’t have to mean digging through config files. Searchcraft includes Vektron, a web-based admin console that gives you full visual control. Relevance tuning, analytics, and user management are all accessible through an intuitive interface. Want to boost the weight of the “title” field in ranking, add a synonym for “sneakers = shoes”, or monitor query traffic? It’s a few clicks in Vektron. This mission control for your search ensures that even non-developers on the team (product managers, content curators) can understand and adjust the search experience, with changes taking effect in real-time.
A great enterprise search platform must satisfy two constituencies: the developers who implement it, and the business stakeholders who care about outcomes. Searchcraft delivers clear value to both.
Searchcraft is built for speed—both in performance and in how fast you can ship it. With developer-first SDKs for JavaScript, React, and Vue, implementation takes minutes, not weeks. You won’t need to wrangle clusters, tune indexes, or learn a new query language. Our APIs are intuitive, our documentation is extensive, and our platform handles provisioning, scaling, and uptime behind the scenes. Whether you’re adding search to a new product or replacing a clunky legacy system, Searchcraft lets you stay focused on building user experiences—not babysitting infrastructure.
Great search drives results—and Searchcraft is built to prove it. By helping users find the right content faster, we boost conversions, lower bounce rates, and reduce support volume with better self-service. Unlike legacy platforms, Searchcraft also delivers full visibility: our Vektron dashboard lets product managers and marketers track top queries, optimize relevance, and tune performance in real time—no dev ticket required. And with lower infrastructure costs and built-in monetization tools, Searchcraft turns search from a backend expense into a growth engine.
Legacy search had its chance – it’s time to board a more modern ship. Searchcraft is built to be the enterprise search software you’ve always wanted: fast, friendly, and unreasonably effective. If you’re ready to deliver cosmic-level search experiences to your users (and leave the backend headaches behind), now’s the time to take action.
Elastic, Elasticsearch and other related marks are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of Elasticsearch B.V. in the United States and other countries.
Algolia and other related marks are trademarks, logos or registered trademarks of Algolia, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
Apache ® and Apache Solr are registered and unregistered trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries.
Typesense is a registered trademark of Typesense, Inc.