Review: The Enterprise Search Report

by Chiara Fox

March 31, 2005

The Enterprise Search Report: Requirements, Costs, Products, and Practices
By Stephen Arnold
$1,350 (single user)

“The Enterprise Search Report: Requirements, Costs, Products, and Practices,” by CMS Watch’s Stephen Arnold, is a useful tool for anyone working on an enterprise search project.

The report is a hefty 464 pages, but don’t let the length dissuade you. The descriptions of how search works, recommendations for how teams and projects should be structured, as well as the information about hidden costs and how to control them make the report worth your time.

Search Isn’t Just Search

Not all searches are the same, and Arnold does an excellent job explaining the difference between web search and enterprise search.

Web search is for finding, well, web content, whether that be content on the Internet or on your own company’s intranet or website. “Web search has roots in automated routines that visit a URL or series of URLs on a schedule, index the information, and make a search box available,” Arnold writes.

Enterprise search, on the other hand, is limited to specific information produced by a company. Instead of a spider or crawler adding content to the system, enterprise search can also receive a direct file transfer from other enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The file types supported with enterprise search could number in the hundreds, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, and Adobe PDF.

While many search vendors espouse the virtues of a single search engine for an entire enterprise, Arnold points out that this may not be practical or preferable. Specialized searches are sometimes necessary for specialized content. A web search engine may be just what you need for your company’s website, while an enterprise search engine could help to retrieve documents out of the human resources and products databases on your intranet. Using the tool most appropriate to the task is key.

Beneath the Surface

There are three core features that make up all enterprise search systems. The first is the ability to sift through the words in a document, and then generate an index that a user can search. The second is administrative controls that allow you to adjust and tweak the system in terms of content, indexing speed, how relevancy is determined, and so on. The final component is log recording to capture various metrics on how the system is performing. Common metrics include the number of queries, most common queries, and number of results or “hits” found for each query.

Of course, enterprise search systems offer a variety of further features and functionality in addition to these core features. You’ll find a slew of buzzwords in search marketing materials: natural language processing, classification and taxonomies, results clustering, federated or metasearch, and document warehousing. Arnold explains what these features bring to the search experience and provides insights into how to prioritize which of these features are necessary for your organization.

The most helpful aspect of this report was the explanation of how enterprise search engines actually function. Rather than getting caught up in academic or technical descriptions of information retrieval, Arnold offers a simple account of the different processes. With clear graphics and charts, he shows relationships between search-engine components, such as indexing, query processing, and post-processing. The report includes best practices as well as potential pitfalls.

Having a Successful Search Project

One of Arnold’s goals with this report is to help the reader have a successful enterprise search implementation. He devotes a lot of time to discussing the institutional processes and foundation you should have in place before you ever hear the first sales pitch. He also outlines the roles and responsibilities that make up successful search teams. The principle roles include:

• a project manager to keep the project on time,
• an information professional – also called a librarian or information architect – who indexes documents and ensures quality results,
• an information technology professional with the necessary programming skills,
• a financial professional who ensures that the necessary budget is available,
• a consultant who specializes in search implementations,
• and finally, the searcher or system user, who ensures that the end result is usable and will meet his or her needs.

Arnold also gives recommendations on how to build a business case for your search project. He explains the difference between return on investment (ROI) and an internal rate of return (IRR), and how and when to use them to justify your need for a search project. However, he cautions that cost should not be the most critical consideration, “The real metric for an enterprise search system is the value of the system.”

The report does outline recommendations on costs – including key areas where cost spikes can easily occur, like system performance – but it also touches on infrastructure requirements, and provides key questions to help you evaluate vendors. Arnold also gives recommendations for both small and large enterprises, since the needs of each vary greatly.

The Bake Off

The bulk of “The Enterprise Search Report” is comprised of detailed product reviews. It highlights the most important and influential 27 out of 100-plus commercial search vendors in the marketplace today. Vendors are categorized by license fee (i.e., lower end, higher end, specialized) and focus (more web vs. more enterprise). A helpful grid and tables give readers a feel for the vendors at a glance.

Each vendor review includes: an overview chart of the solution and its key competitors, an introduction, some information about the company, a summary of features, a detailed description of the solution that includes technical architecture, an evaluation of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, and a final conclusion. The report does not point out a single “best” search engine. Rather, it attempts to describe the options in objective terms so you are better able to evaluate the solution that will best meet your individual needs. To determine how vendors perform, Arnold suggests testing favored vendors with a large sample of your data on your own infrastructure.

Overall, “The Enterprise Search Report” is worthwhile. It’s filled with helpful tips that will facilitate any enterprise search project. If you’re working on such a project, this report is a sound investment.

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Chiara Fox is a senior information architect for Adaptive Path. She’s worked with Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as PeopleSoft, AT&T, Square D, L.L. Bean, and Hewlett-Packard.