We evaluated Autonomy vs Google Search Appliance at an ex-employer. The GSA worked out of the box, the Autonomy Search needed a consultant in every week to try and tune it as the results were crap.
I was also very unimpressed with their stock technology. And it was obvious they were trying to attach as many consulting hours to the sale as possible.
It felt like a very old, late 90s era search engine, one of the ones with lots of banner ads, with a few of the internals exposed so you could get various metrics off of it.
> needed a consultant in every week to try and tune it
This also feels familiar to me, something about constantly massaging the system till it started giving optimal results or something. I think "tending the garden till it bears fruit" was the phrase used (it was almost 10 years ago now!)
