What is Enterprise or Intranet Search and Big Data?

Isn’t it frustrating when you can’t find that file or information? You’ve used every keyword and combination of key phrases to find that information from your corporate intranet and internet websites but still has not produced the search results that you are looking for.

Search applications are becoming an important component of any large internet facing website or corporate intranet. An example of a search application is Google Appliance, Funnelback Search and HP/Autonomy IDOL. These search applications provide the user with a single point of access to all data on one search interface.

Today information comes from multiple different sources and the volume of data that companies manage is growing fast. These data sources are everywhere within your corporate intranet, shared directories, databases, email servers, network file repositories, external data sources, posts about your company on social media sites, website logs, transaction records of customer payments, images of your company and security videos, weather sensors, competitors stock information, references to offline data, online search trends, etc…. This data is BIG DATA.

The challenge of BIG DATA is to find meaning, create information structures and order from sometimes chaotic sources of data.

What is Enterprise or Intranet Search?

Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience. – Wikipedia

Enterprise search technology is designed to search, index and retrieve electronic information, including from locations such as shared drives, intranets, databases, applications, document and web content management systems. Enterprise search technology is generally made up of the following three components:

1. Crawling/indexing engine—searches the organisation’s repositories and places that information into a structure that can then be searched more efficiently.
2. Query engine—searches the newly formed index for key words and creates a list of the relevant documents.
3. Ranking/relevance engine—orders the documents so that the most useful item is at the top of the list.

Enterprise search technology can increase the accessibility to information resources of a public authority. The amount of time staff members spend searching for internal documents may be reduced by having technology that indexes electronic documents in organisational repositories. (source: www.archives.qld.gov.au)

Enterprise or Intranet Search engines provide users with faster response times and search engine results that are customized to suit the requirements of the corporate user.

Enterprise search engines indexes and search everything that is contained within the organization’s own private corporate network.

Enterprise Search is not SEO because the corporate search administrator is in control of how the search engine produces results and which files to index. When you are in control of the corporate search engine you have the capability to push contents up to the first line of the first page of the search results.