In the world of business, Search isn’t just about finding information. That’s the starting point. To be valuable to an organization, a search has to result in the ability to do something meaningful and profitable with the information you find. It has to be an integral part of a business productivity infrastructure.
Influenced by the consumer search experience on the Internet, the people in your organization have clear and demanding expectations about the way Search will look and feel within a business environment — as well as high standards for the relevance of results served. As an IT professional, you’re aware of the importance of effective enterprise-wide Search capabilities, and you know what kind of Enterprise Search experience employees are looking for. But you may find it a challenge to deliver what’s required, because Enterprise Search and Internet Search are very different.
In addition, navigating the marketplace for Enterprise Search solutions is a time-consuming and confusing task, with choices seemingly polarized between low-end, inexpensive offerings with basic features, and high-end, highly customizable, expensive solutions.

Influenced by the consumer search experience, and driven by a clear need to provide information workers with timely, customized access to relevant business data, companies are looking for comprehensive search capabilities that span disparate information sources and integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure. However, given the complexities of the enterprise environment, the challenge that many organizations are facing is how to ensure that an enterprise search matches user expectations, and how to make sense of the seemingly polarized choices available in the marketplace.
What’s Driving Enterprise Search?

The Need to Make Search Real
In the world of business, Search isn’t just about finding information. To be valuable to an organization, a search has to result in the ability to do something meaningful and profitable with the information you find. Enterprise Search isn’t simply about investigating content; it’s all about applying the knowledge you gather and using it to benefit the business you’re driving. It’s about real people needing the right tools to help them get their jobs done.

The Information Explosion
The foundation of today’s business landscape is information — and we’re all aware that the volume of information we consume, as well as the data we generate, is growing rapidly —  quantified at a rate of about 40 percent per annum. The information explosion in the workplace has imposed new performance pressure on employees, who now work with an overwhelming amount of data and struggle to make sense of what they find. According to IDC, a typical information worker in North America has seen the daily volume of business-related email increase by a factor of 10 since 1997. Confirming this trend, Berkeley University estimates that digital information will increase over 20 fold from 2001 to 2008. As a result of this deluge of data, information workers spend progressively more time searching, analyzing, and sharing information. IDC estimates that information workers spend on average 48% of their time searching for and analyzing information, (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively) which costs an organization $28,000 per worker per year.  They also spend an additional 8.3 hours per week managing document routing and approval across teams, costing an extra $12,400 per year.

Empowering People to Find What They Need to Do Their Jobs
In order to achieve business objectives, workers must have access to the people and the data they need to make informed, timely, and impactful decisions. But that information must be relevant — to avoid overburdening a person with unnecessary and distracting data, or conversely under-serving them with lack of detail. It also needs to be well protected to ensure that information is transparent only to authorized users. The vice-president of customer relations will need a very different view of the same data as a customer care specialist, for example. It’s all about getting the right amount of information to the right person in the right format.
A sales executive responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) might need to access information from her laptop, a corporate information site, and some web pages. A finance manager reviewing a budget would be more interested in data from finance systems, document repositories, team sites, as well as input from subject matter experts. An executive preparing a strategy briefing might concentrate his search on SAP, or another line-of-business (LOB) system.
The Need for Business Efficiencies
According to an IDC estimate, fruitless searches can cost an organization millions of dollars annually — the expense of not finding the information needed costs an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers about US$5.3 million per year  as they search through vast amount of structured and unstructured data. Considering the stakes, companies simply cannot afford to sustain an inefficient Search solution.

The Consumer Search Experience
Influenced by the consumer search experience on the Internet, information workers have clear and demanding expectations about how a search solution should look, feel and perform. As an IT professional, you’re aware of the importance of effective enterprise-wide Search capabilities, and you know what kind of experience employees are looking for.  But you may find it challenging to deliver what’s required because Enterprise Search and Internet Search are very different.

WHAT THG DOES for SEARCH
A good Enterprise Search solution will be as effective for the people who use it as it is for the people who are responsible for its administration and security, so it’s not surprising that there is no single component that defines successful Enterprise Search.
While relevancy is key, the user experience is also important, because an unfamiliar, complex, or inconvenient user interface will be a barrier to adoption.
An effective Search solution will also provide efficient access to unstructured data and unlock information stored in line-of-business systems. It will provide easy access to people and expertise—making it a one-stop-shop for finding all the organization has to offer to solve a problem.  And it will meet the needs of IT professionals by providing a secure, manageable, scalable and extensible platform. 
What to Look for in an Enterprise Search Solution
Relevancy
• Relevance should be tuned for the organization, taking into account differences between Enterprise and Internet Search, such as link structure, hierarchy across sites, security, and the level of difficulty involved in finding documentation (document findability).
• Relevance should also take into account a rich and broad range of additional factors, such as click distance, URL text matching, metadata extraction, language detection, file type biasing, and text analysis.
User Experience
• The interface between the user and the search function should be simple, intuitive, and familiar, to encourage and enhance the experience.
• Search should be available from the interfaces of frequently used applications.
Efficient Access to Unstructured Data
• Although people generally have access to unstructured data, the process of finding it is often inefficient, with files in multiple locations (for example, multiple file shares containing duplicate copies and different versions of documents). Look for a solution that provides a clear, direct, and quick path to relevant information.
Access to Structured Data and LOB Systems
• Many organizations lock down much of their structured data, for fear of unauthorized users seeing more than they should — resulting in users being deprived of information that could be useful to them. Find a solution that helps secure and protect information where necessary, allowing appropriate access to structured data and LOB systems such as Siebel, SAP, CRM, and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
• Where users do have unobstructed access to structured data, differences in the search interface, syntax, and query methods can result in challenges both during the search for information and when interpreting results. Look for a solution that provides a common Search framework, regardless of the information source, and make sure that the interface allows casual users to have easy access to complex data sets.

People Search
• Getting a job done involves working with the right people, so it is important to find subject matter experts based on their knowledge and contacts. When choosing an Enterprise Search Solution, make sure you can narrow your search results, for example by region or department, with minimal clicks, and also consider factors such as social distance. Opt for an integrated solution, whereby the user can easily make good use of real-time communications, to build relationships such as knowledge networks and project teams.
Security, Management and Scalability
• Look for solutions that provide custom security trimming, as well as standard features to help protect corporate information from unauthorized access. Find out how granular the administrative controls are and check for customizable interfaces, scalability, and extensibility.