How to Implement Best Enterprise Search Solution

What is Enterprise Search

Enterprise search is a complex system of search, through which authorised users are able to search across different data sources used by the organization. Data sources might be application databases, file system, Email servers, Document Management Systems, intranets etc. The structured or unstructured data from different sources is indexed by the enterprise search system and made searchable.

Enterprise search system is comprised of a data collection unit, data analysis and processing unit, data indexing unit search and presentation unit through which users can search different terms in combination of available filters. The search unit is responsible for matching search results with indexed data and return with results that are most appropriate and relevant to user search query.

Advantages

Enterprise search is a centralized system, it usually contains data from most of the sources so it helps improving in decision making based on data. It also helps in enhancing productivity by reducing the wastage of time that people use looking for different information across the organization. This central point of access helps organization to overcome the issues in their customer service.

Choosing the Best Enterprise Search Solution

Enterprise Search solutions and predictive analytics solutions are available as hosted solutions, locally deployed and search appliances known as search in a box. Each solution has its own pros and cons, like hosted solutions require considerable trust between vendor and enterprise, on the other hand local installations require more resources to maintain and upgrade the system.

There are various paid and open source enterprise search solutions available. It depends on the requirements and consideration of an enterprise to select a suitable enterprise search solution.

Few features to consider for choosing the optimal solution

1. Easily configurable
2. Extendible
3. Scalability and fault tolerance
4. Reporting and monitoring
5. Standard communication interfaces
6. Advanced full text search capabilities
7. Compensate high volume traffic
8. Number of formats or sources it supports
9. Languages supported
10. Security
11. Search user features like clustered search, synonyms, spelling and typeahead suggestions, hit highlighting etc.

Custom Implementation

Apart from available commercial solutions, Enterprise Search can be implemented using open source search engines like Apache Solr or Elasticsearch. As we have discussed already that Enterprise Search is comprised of several components, we are mapping Enterprise Search units with Apache Solr here.

When it comes to data gathering from different sources there are may open source tools, but Lucene Connector Framework (LCF) is prominent and it also integrates with Solr. One can use LCF to crawl a website, intranet site, database, file system, Sharepoint and many more and send the data to Solr.

Apache Solr comes with Apache Tika built-in which is used to index rich content such as Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word and more, there are several other tools with support for more sources, freely available over internet, through which data from various sources can be analysed and process.

Apache Solr is used for the indexing unit, and PHP or any other open source language can be used to implement user interface and it can query Solr indices using Solr API to provide the complete functionality of an Enterprise Search System. Apache Solr has many built in features, that are useful for Enterprise Search like clustered search, synonyms, spelling and typeahead suggestions, hit highlighting,Faceted Search and Filtering and many more.