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Tools to Help You Search

Need some help with this game of information hide and seek? Enter the wide range of search tools available to use within businesses. Some are provided by large, well-known vendors while others are offered by small, relative unknowns. You can be guaranteed that because of the inherent challenges in this search game that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, many of the search solutions are highly niched for narrowly defined purposes. You may find yourself using multiple solutions within your company to serve different purposes.

Let's take a high-level look at some of the major players in enterprise search. (Three of the following search tools were nominated by readers in Intranet Journal's Product of Year awards, voting for which is going on now.)

Google

Google is synonymous with searching the Internet. After all, "Google" has even become a verb. Google also offers an enterprise search solution called Google Search Enterprise. Google's search engine crawls your Intranet and other content, creating a master index that is at the ready to retrieve results when someone searches.

Information on how the product works behind the scenes is as closely guarded as the "secret sauce" in Google itself. With support for more than 220 file formats it marches in step with other vendors in terms of what types of files it supports. Google Search Enterprise provides the end user with results clustering and source biasing so that you can expect relevant results, and those from authoritative sources (as defined by your administrator) are more likely to appear in their results.

The Google product Web site claims that in order to find the highest quality and most relevant documents, Google factors in more than 100 variables for each query. So, once again, the "secret sauce" is at play even though we don't know what those proprietary 100 variables are.

ISYS

ISYS:web 8 is the company's latest suite for enterprise search, navigation, and discovery. Whether used across networks using the "desktop" version or via your Intranet using the "Web" version, the same core technology is at play.

ISYS boasts support for 200 file formats and 60 languages and multiple query methods. So, you get the advantage of browsing taxonomy while also being able to search on the fly. It offers on-the-fly categorization to make use of metadata inherent in the file and its storage location while allowing administrators to further categorize information using additional metadata. Search results also allow users to navigate between and within search results and documents to take them right to the information that matches the users search terms.

Autonomy

Autonomy is a leader in Meaning Based Computing. On the company's Web site they define Meaning Based Computing as enabling computers to understand the relationships that exist between disparate pieces of information and perform sophisticated analysis operations with real business value, automatically and in real-time. That's a mouthful for saying that they develop products that help you find and relate the vast amount of unstructured information that exists within your company.

Autonomy IDOL is the foundation of all the Autonomy solutions. It is a platform for understanding the meaning and significance of disparate information. A variety of modules are included in the server to help you handle taxonomy, linking, categorizing, and retrieving information. The functionality of the server is realized through its applications which include desktop search, CRM, portal, Web interface, and collaborative networking.

FAST Search

Fast Solutions focus on the information needs of companies to help them answer the "who, what, when, where, and why" questions to support business decisions, compliance, and investigative activities.

FAST Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) is the foundation of the company's products and is designed to search large networks for numerous file types. You can extend the ESP platform with other FAST offerings to provide the same search capabilities to your users regardless of whether they are mobile or connected to their desktop providing a single access point to all your corporate information. Specifically designed for the needs of search within large internal organizations, they offer their FAST Intranet Solution.

IBM

IBM has many fine business tools and enterprise search is no exception. IBM OmniFind is IBM's solution to solving your search woes.

There are 4 different OmniFind products to choose from. Enterprise Edition, Enterprise Starter Edition, Discovery Edition, and Yahoo Edition. The Enterprise (and Starter) editions are optimized for Lotus Domino and WebSphere portal environments. As you might expect, the Yahoo Edition is a collaboration with Yahoo and offers users the familiar search and browsing interface of Yahoo for your company's Intranet, local, and remote file system content. Formerly known as WebSphere Content Discovery Server. The Discovery Edition utilizes IBM's Content Management and Discovery capabilities to provide contextual understanding capabilities to content search.

The market and technologies are still in flux when it comes to enterprise search, and I would expect that to continue for some time and volumes could be written about the topic. A quick visit to Enterprise Search Center yields more information than you probably need.

If you've been hoping for a magic bullet that allows users to use one perfect search tool to find any information they need quickly and reliably across the enterprise, you're just going to have to keep waiting (and hoping the fantasy will come true, much like the truly paperless office). The good news is that a variety of tools already exist to help you get your arms around your search needs and will get you headed in the right direction.

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