• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 20, 2009

An open source tool that Google created to test and compare site search results from two separate search engines has been made available for free.

Side-by-Side, offered through Enterprise Labs, lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data while searching a company's intranet to determine the one that provides the better results.

It allows users to tell search administrators whether the correct results come to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) by allowing them to compare two engines side by side. For example, it would allow users to view side-by-side results from a company's existing site search engine, and Google Search Appliance 6.0, the latest release. People who use the tool see two panes on the screen, each containing a set of search results.

Only 25% of businesses have enterprise search solutions, says Cyrus Mistry, Google product manager for Side-by-Side, citing a recent stat from the marketing department. "I would have thought most companies have something," he says. "We think of enterprise search as an overarching search-all-of-your-system solution, but many times companies will have a portal and tools that come integrated with search."

The company's administrator decides the set of queries, and users visit an internal Web site where they see the queries and vote on the set of search results they prefer. After voting, a side-by-side tool reveals the site that received the most votes. It also lets companies test configurations, shows results, and determines whether there's enough data to be statistically significant. Side-by-Side is available for free on the Google Enterprise Labs Web site.

Mistry says Google developed the tool for internal use when Google employees needed an easy way to test one search configuration versus another. "We experimented with many of the old-fashioned ways that were very cumbersome," he says. "We would make them rank every query for every result -- literally all results."

When Mistry first arrived at Mountain View, Calif.-based Google three years ago, he was given 75 queries to test. Knowing there is a much easier method to accomplish the same task, he put a bug in the ears of Google engineers to create a side-by-side comparison tool to see the two sets of results. The tool would enable users to vote on the one that performed better.

In the end, users just want to see the best results at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), he says.

About 25,000 enterprise search customers use one of Google's site search tools: Google Site Search, Google Search Appliance, or Google Mini.