Imagine an Organization with huge portfolios, huge database (for Knowledge sharing, Resource information, Policy Documents etc), which has to be constantly accessed for different information. When we say information is wealth, we also understand the importance of getting information in a short span of time. And in an enterprise, the source of information doesnt come from a Single source and the information on different portfolios are not maintained in a single place. Most of the resources spend 80% of the time searching for the an information by physically moving into each folder of the servers. Unstructured information represents the vast majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises. Exploiting this information requires systems for managing and extracting knowledge from large collections of unstructured data and applications for discovering patterns and relationships. Though the documents are logically partitioned(One Server for Insurance, One Server for securities etc), still the process becomes too tuff. Here is where Enterprise search platform comes into picture.Speaking about Enterprise Search, searches within the enterprise are often not just about finding information,but mining it, reusing it and “finding out what the information byproducts".Enterprise search is far more complex and difficult than Internet searches for a number of reasons.For one thing, points out Susan Feldman, an IDC analyst, the business models are entirely different.Another challenge is that search engines in the enterprise need to touch a wide range of file types and documents, both structured and unstructured. The vast majority of information in the enterprise is not neatly stored in a database.Search is also made difficult because enterprises lack page ranking systems, so they must use other methods to determine how closely a result matches a request.

            As far as business is concerned, there lies an oppurtunity where there is a problem. Most of the present day organization comes up with home grown products (Called Organic Search Engines) for search But do they have the stuff in them to match the Customized Enterprise search engines provided by Search Monzarts like FAST,Vivisimo etc. These companies, provide what they call Search Derivative Applications.

            Search Derivative Applications (SDA) are built upon the Enterprise Search Platform (ESP). ESP is a Service-oriented architecture development platform which is geared towards production searchable indexes. It provides a flexible framework for creating ETL applications for effecient indexing of searchable content.

              For example, FAST provides extensive products that can be customized to search documents, webpages, pdf’s , publishings etc within an intranet for an Enterprise Framework. Google doesnt lag behind though. They do provide customized SDA’s based oon well know page rank system. There can be two ways auto indexing of these documents can be done. Either set crawlers within intranet or provide a framewok where by indexing is done automatically when a User loads the data/file into the server. Check an high level view given by newIdeaEngineering.

           Talking about Google Search Appliance, a SDA by google, Dave Girouard says "At a simple level, it’s a Google search engine in a box — a box that has the entire Google search engine built into it. You install [it] in your datacenter, turn it on and set a couple of configurations. Then it creates a Google search engine within your company for all the information, documents and Web pages throughout your corporate intranet. It’s also used broadly on public-facing sites for doing what we refer to as a site search." The same SDA framework made FAST to get the Intra Search BID of Youtube(Currently acquired by Google).

       The problem of structuring enterprise data is ofcourse a challenge. But the SDA’s and search startegies offered by companies like Vivisiomo, FAST,Google etc have certainly reduce the complexity. But still the challenge of partitioning and structuring the data still exists. Lets see how far we reach, with every other Search engines entering this domain.

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