What is Enterprise Search?

Enterprise Search is the practice of looking for and retrieving data and information within the digital environment of an organization. Specialized software and tools are used to search, index, and present data from a myriad of sources such as documents, intranets, databases, emails, and the internet.

Having an enterprise search application is important to any organization. It helps employees find information efficiently and effectively. It is of particular significance in big organizations where a large volume of data needs to be distributed across different platforms and employees, and in varying formats.

The main goal of these tools is to help organizations find relevant information from within their data landscape, saving time and enhancing employee productivity.

How Does Enterprise Search Work?

Enterprise search tools use a mix of indexing, querying, ranking, and presentation mechanisms to get all the important information from different sources within the organization. It typically works in a standard series of steps.

1. Collection and indexing

• Data Collection: The system first collects data from various sources, such as documents, databases, intranet, file shares, emails, web content, and more.
• Data Pre-Processing: After the data is collected, it is processed to obtain text and metadata, such as file names, authors, and dates.
• Tokenization and Analysis: All the content in text format is further segmented into individual tokens or words. Different linguistic analysis techniques are then applied, such as stemming, which essentially reduces words to their base form, and lemmatization, bringing them to their dictionary form.
• Building the Index: Once the collected information is processed, the content is put in an index, a structured database that helps in the quick retrieval of data when needed.

2. Querying

• Query Input and Parsing: The user sends a search query, and the enterprise search system gets the query text along with other parameters. After that, the query is parsed to comprehend its components using phrases, keywords, operators, and other search features.
• Ranking: The search system gives ranking algorithms to check the documents’ importance according to the query. The scoring is done using several different parameters including document popularity and keyword frequency.

3. Retrieval and presentation

• Result Retrieval: The enterprise search tool retrieves documents that are connected to the query based on ranking scores.
• Aggregation: All these documents are aggregated and grouped and shown in the search bar. They are presented to the user via an interface. The user can view the details and then adjust the queries if needed.

4. Query expansion and enhancement

• Synonyms and Variants: At times, enterprise search tools use linguistic databases and synonym lists to elaborate the query. They include functions like synonyms or some variations of the keywords. This helps in improving the chances of getting relevant results. Some use natural language processing (NLP) to better understand the content and the user’s intent, giving more accurate results.

5. Security and access control

• Authorization: The enterprise search tool gives access control where the user must provide verification permission. The search results are only shown to those with authorized access.
• Document-Level Security: Sometimes, the enterprise system also secures the individual document so that there is an additional layer of security. This is mainly done for sensitive documents.

6. Continuous improvement

• Analytics: All advanced systems have analytics tools that work towards improving search techniques and giving better and more accurate results, enhancing user experience and better content segmentation. They track user behavior, click-through rates, popular queries, and some other parameters.

Use Cases of Enterprise Search

Enterprise search has many use cases in a contemporary business.

Intranet searches

Often organizations have large intranets with specified spaces for every department within the business. Enterprise search helps organize the information and gives relevant information when needed in a short span of time.

E-commerce and customer service

Enterprise search helps businesses with an e-commerce portal with data about customer purchase history and buying habits. It also improves customer service, quickly informing representatives about callers and users.

Recruitment

An enterprise search system helps large companies navigate through a a high volume of candidates applying for jobs. It is used to match applications with job descriptions, hastening the process of finding the right person for the job.

Internal contact directory

Enterprise search systems make finding an address or contact number easier. They can also search for a contact’s name, job description, and expertise, which is beneficial for finding internal subject matter experts.

Documents and drives

Enterprise search aids in searching for unstructured data, with the capability to look for content within files rather than only depending on the name of a folder or file.

What Are the Benefits of Having Enterprise Search?

Enterprise search tools make it much easier to retrieve and access information in an organized format, centralize content, and trim data silos. Some of the key benefits that enterprise search tools offer:

Better productivity

It’s estimated that the average employee spends about 2.5 hours a day looking for information, which is 30% of their workday. An average digital worker spends about 28% of the workweek simply looking for emails and another 20% searching for internal information. This is a massive cost to the company and dramatically reduces overall productivity.

Having an effective enterprise search portal is crucial because users can perform routine jobs of retrieving data in a short timespan so they can turn their focus to accomplishing core tasks. In addition, employee productivity will increase because these enterprise search tools also refine queries and give valuable insights about the data at hand.

Increased collaboration

Enterprise search fosters improved collaboration as it enables employees to easily share and access information between different teams and departments. This offers seamless workflows and effective knowledge sharing. It also reduces miscommunication.

Improved decision-making

Enterprise search solutions keep employees up to date with information, assisting them in making faster, and more informed decisions. This makes the decision-making process more agile and efficient.

Fewer data silos

Data silos are a significant roadblock in collaboration and knowledge sharing. If an organization suffers from duplicate or fragmented data, it results in reduced employee productivity and faulty decision-making. Having an enterprise search tool can give employees access to information across all data pockets in the enterprise, including both external and internal sources.

High quality data

Enterprise search tools centralize information, giving employees access to accurate data at all times. This speaks volumes to the improvement of the enterprise’s data integrity. All content is consistent and available from one single source, which improves the overall data quality and works wonders for the business, especially larger organizations with high volumes of information.

Reduces duplication

Enterprise search tools offer centralized data from all sources. This means there is a reduced risk of creating duplicate files or documents.

More varied, detailed, and accurate insights

Advanced enterprise search tools have analytics features that provide insights into search patterns, user behavior, and content popularity. This aids organizations in identifying trends and marking areas for improvement.

What are the Challenges with Enterprise Search?

Implementing and maintaining an efficient enterprise search tool can pose many problems, from technical issues to organizational and user problems. Here are some of the common challenges that organizations could face with their solutions:

Data fragmentation

Organizations often store data in different systems, platforms, and repositories, leading to data fragmentation. Even with the help of an enterprise search solution, it can take time to integrate and index these disparate sources.

Security risks

Enterprise search tools are constantly threatened by security problems, just like any IT system, especially those linked to the web. Hackers lurk, waiting for an opportunity or loophole to hijack a solution and steal data and valuable information. This could prove to be a significant security threat to the company.

Heterogeneous and scattered legacy hardware systems

Usually, enterprise search software provides access to content and data in real-time across different sources within the organization. However, for many enterprises, the data is connected to many legacy devices, and sometimes there is limited internet access. This can make it difficult or impossible for a search engine to scan every device and hardware system to search and index content.

Balancing access and restrictions

Giving correct levels of access and permission to documents can be a challenging task for both enterprise search engine solution providers and the employees who oversee them. However, if proper checks and controls are not in place, it can cause more damage than good. Updating this access and making it personalized for every employee is essential.

Integrating new technologies

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have made an indelible mark in the search engine field, making relevant searches far easier than previously. However, developing AI and ML technologies and integrating them with an enterprise search solution is a major challenge.

Consolidating enterprise search systems

Most often, companies use a variety of enterprise search engines, each with its unique purpose and strengths along with weaknesses and limitations. Studies have shown that 60% of knowledge workers regularly use around four different systems just to do their jobs. It is an arduous but essential task to consolidate these search systems.

Search query complexity

Even though an organization might have a good enterprise search solution, it might not be easy to formulate effective search queries, delivering sub-optimal results. This challenge can be resolved by using NLP and query suggestions.

Language and multilingual support

Enterprise search solutions might struggle to support multiple languages to get accurate results in every language. This poses a problem, especially for companies that have a global presence.

Lack of metadata

Very often, documents, especially legacy documents, do not have proper metadata. This makes it tough to index and categorize them well.

High costs

If an organization intends to implement a search function that uses all content, breaks down data silos, utilizes AI and ML, works within legacy systems, offers multilingual functions, and allows complex NLP for searches, it’s expensive.

These are some of the main challenges that organizations can face with an enterprise search engine. However, most of these can be overcome by planning out proper implementation after considering user needs and technology solutions.

Overcoming Challenges with These Key Features of Enterprise Search

Enterprises are continuously collecting large amounts of data, making it nearly impossible to find relevant information without a highly structured and complex system in place to manage it. Enterprise search engines reduce the time to find this data in an organized manner, giving employees more time to concentrate on other important tasks. A robust system should be equipped with a range of features for seamless operations.

Unified search

The ability to search across various data sources and content repositories, such as documents, emails, databases, intranet sites, file shares, etc., from a single search interface.

Advanced search capabilities

This is an advanced search functionality that is more than simple keyword matching. It includes Boolean operators, wildcard search, filters, faceted search, and proximity search.

Natural language processing (NLP)

This is an excellent feature to have in an enterprise search system, as NLP techniques can help understand natural language queries. This, in turn, gives more accurate and context-relevant search results.

Relevance ranking

They are algorithms that show the relevance of search results based on a few parameters like document popularity, keyword frequency, metadata, and user behavior.

Content enrichment

It helps extract data and add metadata to all the documents, like categories, tags, and key terms. This enhances categorization and search accuracy.

User friendliness

Enterprise search platforms should be easy to use. Users should be presented with a simple, understandable, and intuitive interface, making it seamless for users to access.

Flexibility and customization

Enterprise search systems should be flexible and allow organizations to personalize the software to fulfill their search requirements. They should have the option to choose specific functionalities and adjust the look and feel of the system to create tailor-made software for the requirements of the organization.

Search analytics

An enterprise search system is not only about looking for content and categorizing it. It is supposed to help organizations analyze and learn from their data. This type of search analytics in real-time is of great importance to making business decisions and improving employee productivity.

Text mining capabilities

Enterprise search platforms should have built-in text-mining features to serve the text-mining needs of modern organizations. Some of the important ones are data classification, sentiment analysis, semantic similarity, LOD mapping, named entity recognition, and entity extraction.

Semantic search

Organizations with vast amounts of unstructured data must have semantic search features in their enterprise search engine platforms. This feature helps the tool understand the context behind a query and then deliver more accurate and relevant results.

Mobile and remote access

Users should be able to access enterprise search tools from different devices and locations for on-the-go access and improved remote work.

It’s important to note that different solutions may offer varying combinations of these features, so organizations should evaluate their specific needs and priorities when selecting a system.

Gain a Competitive Edge

The insurmountable layers of unstructured data in an organization have given birth to the requirement for an effective and efficient enterprise search system. This software allows companies to retrieve, organize and analyze data from within the organization’s digital landscape. It helps them make better-informed decisions, enhances workforce productivity, and gains a competitive edge. Though it has some challenges, they can be overcome with proper planning and requirement analysis. Get this tool for your organization today to help things run more seamlessly and effortlessly for your business.