Introduction

The term ‘enterprise’ tends to be widely used in the IT industry to signify a high-performance software application for use by Fortune 500-type companies. Over the last few years there has been much discussion about what the difference is between a web content management application and an enterprise content management (ECM) application. The same applies to the search business, although, in common with ECM applications, there is the sense that these solutions are designed primarily to work behind the corporate firewall.

The concept of enterprise search is to be able to locate information from any specified server/application, which may include not only internal servers but also external information services. This information might be held in:

This list is very incomplete, and of course the complexity is increased quite substantially by the extent of language diversity. In many enterpriselevel applications the two languages are UK English and American English, and although there are no issues of transliteration and translation, the problems of synonym management (e.g. gas rather than petrol) are very substantial. It does not help that few organizations would have an accurate list of all the database applications and servers that might contain information broadly relevant to the totality of the enterprise.

Another issue with the term ‘enterprise’ is that it has a connotation of a for-profit organization. The reality is that all organizations are an enterprise when it comes to specifying a search solution.

In many organizations the requirement for enterprise search starts with the need to provide an effective search solution for an intranet. It is often when implementing an intranet search solution that the organization realizes that employees would benefit from access to a wider range of information applications, and then finds that the intranet solution is not adequately scalable in power or extensible in functionality to provide an enterprise search solution.