Selecting The Enterprise Search Engine

The final post in this series puts all the parts together that we have been talking about and incorporating a viable enterprise search engine that will satisfy our needs. Depending on your platform of choice and your search needs there are several search engines to select from. To get a jump start on determining what search engine works for you I have included information from New Idea Technologies on Enterprise Search Engines by Mark Bennett.

In his article Mark Bennett presents a summary of the core features and functionality that many enterprise search engine customers are concerned with (see diagram on the left). To summarize his findings Bennett points out that the majority of customers want the capability of the search engine to crawl large numbers of documents, enable secure content features, provide search analytics and content promotion, enable metadata & tagging, the ability to search (crawl) multiple repositories, while also providing faceted and taxonomy based searching.

In addition Bennett identifies the various vendors that are prominent in the search engine space and how they stack up against each other (see diagram on the right). You have your usual suspects such as Microsoft and Google, but he also mentions other vendors such as Lookout Software and IBM along with Oracle who are becoming more involved in the search market. The bottom line is determining what are your specific search requirements, identifying the vendors that meet those requirements and letting them show you (not just tell you!) how they will meet your needs.

I would like to know what your experience has been in identifying and selecting an enterprise search solution and vendor. I look forward to your comments,