Enterprise Search - Differences From Web Search

Differences From Web Search

Beyond the difference in the kinds of materials being indexed, enterprise search systems also typically include functionality that is not associated with the mainstream web search engines. These include:

• Adapters to index content from a variety of repositories, such as databases and content management systems.
• Federated search, which consists of

1. transforming a query and broadcasting it to a group of disparate databases or external content sources with the appropriate syntax,
2. merging the results collected from the databases,
3. presenting them in a succinct and unified format with minimal duplication, and
4. providing a means, performed either automatically or by the portal user, to sort the merged result set.

• Enterprise bookmarking, collaborative tagging systems for capturing knowledge about structured and semi-structured enterprise data.
• Entity extraction that seeks to locate and classify elements in text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc.
• Faceted search, a technique for accessing a collection of information represented using a faceted classification, allowing users to explore by filtering available information.
• Access control, usually in the form of an Access control list (ACL), is often required to restrict access to documents based on individual user identities. There are many types of access control mechanisms for different content sources making this a complex task to address comprehensively in an enterprise search environment.
• Text clustering, which groups the top several hundred search results into topics that are computed on the fly from the search-results descriptions, typically titles, excerpts (snippets), and meta-data. This technique lets users navigate the content by topic rather than by the meta-data that is used in faceting. Clustering compensates for the problem of incompatible meta-data across multiple enterprise repositories, which hinders the usefulness of faceting.
• User interfaces, which in web search are deliberately kept simple in order not to distract the user from clicking on ads, which generates the revenue. Although the business model for enterprise search could include showing ads, in practice this is not done. To enhance end user productivity, enterprise vendors continually experiment with rich UI functionality which occupies significant screen space, which would be problematic for web search.