Article surveys the enterprise-search tools available to companies and identifies key technology developers and vendors.
Google-style search engines are not suitable for some situations. "Where many repositories of non-Web content and documents need to be searched or critical information must be found quickly, companies need to design searches that approximate human reasoning."
Key components to improved enterprise search will be tools for structuring content - now easier with XML tools; building taxonomies - or possibly using light-weight approach of user tagging, or clustering tools; and analyzing text to extract names (entities) or concepts. IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture is being adopted by many vendors as a "backbone" for these approaches.
Companies where this is most needed may include e-commerce sites, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, and call centers.
"The sophisticated search pioneers are e-commerce sites, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, which have the most to gain: greater sales, faster drug development, detection of terrorist activity. Call centers are getting search makeovers so that multiple search tools can mine unstructured content and databases together and give reps all the information they need to close calls."
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