Factors that Influence the Need for Enterprise Search Systems
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009Large organizations require enterprise search applications that suit their working conditions. There are certain factors that need to be analyzed before the right enterprise search technology is implemented in the organization.
Full Text Searches Full text searches are required only when organizations have large number of unstructured data. Unstructured data includes documents, articles, product descriptions, case studies, informal notes, web sites, discussion boards, wikis, emails, messages, job descriptions, resumes, patents, legal decisions, etc. These kinds of searches help to identify the most relevant information that is searched by the user. It is highly useful of high volume researches.
Ideal Results Organizations need to analyze whether they require identification of ideal results during a search. Here the search application is able to maximize the find-ability for different kinds of information. This feature is hard to implement since the goal of search is usually not clear for the user himself. Factors like time and relevancy have to be inbuilt into the enterprise search engine.
Clustering Results It is important for all organizations to analyze whether they need cluster results. Cluster results usually return search results in relevant clusters, which makes it easy for the user to identify is exact requirement. Clustering results are usually returned based on categories like a common subject, date, price range etc. It is a great time-saver, compared to the regular long list of results that are usually returned.
Now that we have the three important factors analyzed it is important to choose an appropriate technology that will suit the organizational requirements. One useful way both to drive requirements and evaluate a technology is to build a proof of concept or prototype of the intended application.
Use a popular search library like Lucene search or Solr search, which is ranked among the top five Apache projects. The Solr search server provides application builders a ready-to-use search platform on top of the Lucene search library, and is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project.