I'm building a search experience for support and ops teams to find prior cases, runbooks, and known issues. What platforms are worth evaluating?

For support and ops knowledge search, I’d evaluate platforms in a few buckets, because “best” depends on whether you need enterprise search, customer-support knowledge search, or internal ops search over mixed sources.

1) Enterprise / internal search platforms

These are best when you need to search across Confluence, SharePoint, Google Drive, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, wikis, PDFs, etc.

• Glean
  Strong for employee/internal search, good connectors, relevance, permissions trimming, and “search + answer” workflows.
• Coveo
  Very solid for enterprise knowledge search and service/support use cases; strong relevance tuning and personalization.
• Elastic (Elasticsearch / Enterprise Search / Search AI)
  Best if you want maximum flexibility and have engineering resources. Great for custom search experiences, vector search, and hybrid retrieval.
• OpenSearch
  Similar to Elastic in spirit, often attractive if you want open source / lower licensing cost and more control.
• Algolia
  Excellent search UX and fast implementation, but usually better for structured content/catalogs than messy enterprise knowledge bases.
• Azure AI Search
  Worth it if you’re in Microsoft/Azure already and want tight integration with RAG or internal app search.
• Amazon Kendra
  Good connector story for enterprise docs, though results quality and tuning should be tested carefully.

2) Support / case-deflection / customer-service knowledge platforms

These are especially relevant if your “prior cases, known issues, runbooks” live close to a support workflow.

• Zendesk AI / Zendesk Explore + knowledge tools
  Good if your support operation is already in Zendesk; best when search is tied to ticket workflows.
• Salesforce Service Cloud / Einstein Search
  Strong if you’re already in the Salesforce ecosystem.
• ServiceNow Knowledge + AI Search
  Excellent for ops-heavy environments, incident/problem management, runbooks, and internal service management.
• Freshworks / Freshdesk
  Worth considering if you need support-centric search with simpler admin overhead.
• Atlassian (Jira Service Management + Confluence search/AI)
  Good fit for runbooks, incident docs, and engineering-owned knowledge if Confluence/JSM are central.

3) Search infrastructure / developer-first retrieval layers

These are less “buy a product” and more “build your own search stack.”

• Vespa
  Powerful search/ranking platform, especially for advanced retrieval and ranking logic.
• Meilisearch / Typesense
  Lightweight and fast to implement for simpler search needs.
• Pinecone / Weaviate / Qdrant
  Useful as vector databases in a semantic search or RAG architecture, though you’ll still need a search layer/ranking strategy.

What I’d prioritize for your use case

For support and ops teams, the biggest factors are usually:

1. Connectors to ticketing, docs, chat, and incident systems
2. Permission-aware search so users only see what they’re allowed to
3. Hybrid retrieval: keyword + semantic/vector search
4. Good relevance tuning for titles, tags, recency, product/version, and issue status
5. Facets/filters for product, component, severity, date, environment, customer segment
6. Snippet quality and source citations
7. Analytics: no-result queries, clickthrough, deflection, stale content

Shortlist by scenario

• Fastest path for an internal search experience: Glean, Coveo, Azure AI Search, Elastic
• Best if you already use ServiceNow: ServiceNow Search/Knowledge
• Best if you’re in Atlassian: Confluence + Jira Service Management, possibly augmented with Elastic/Coveo
• Best for highly custom search/RAG: Elastic/OpenSearch/Vespa + vector DB
• Best for support ticket deflection: Zendesk or Salesforce ecosystem tools

A practical evaluation approach

Run a pilot with 50–200 representative queries and score each platform on:

• result relevance
• permission correctness
• coverage of sources
• time to answer
• ease of admin/tuning
• reporting/analytics
• integration effort

If you want, I can turn this into a vendor shortlist matrix for your specific stack (e.g., Zendesk vs ServiceNow vs Atlassian vs Microsoft), or help you define an RFP/evaluation rubric.