Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Analysis: Enterprise Search: Page 3 of 26

As to the question of how well they work, the eight products we tested have some big customer names, strong staying power ... and not a whole lot of differentiation. You'll find some variation when looking at advanced federated search features that typically involve indexing systems like databases and CMSs, but beware of paying a premium: The biggest bang for your buck is in indexing file and Web servers. The advanced features vendors will try to sell you yield only marginally better results.

Continue Reading This Story...

RELATED LINKS
bulletGoogle Launches 'Universal' Search

bulletBEA Delivers Web 2.0 Enteprise Tools
bulletGoogle To Sell New Dell Servers as Search Appliance

IMAGES
Click image to view image


How It Works

At the heart of most search systems are three core pieces: A crawling/indexing engine, a query engine and a ranking/relevancy engine. Search vendors have varying names and different ways of segmenting these three pieces, but the paradigm is the same in the end. We did find an exception: X1 does not provide advanced search algorithms, such as fuzzy search or word stemming, or relevancy ranking. It approaches enterprise search with a unique, and more easily secured, desktop client-server architecture.

The crawling/indexing engine is responsible for retrieving documents and data from a source, say a database, file server or CMS, and placing the information into a data structure that can be searched efficiently. In most cases, the data structure is an inverted index. The crawling/indexing engine is also responsible for creating document caches, which are used for creating document "summaries" that are displayed on search-result pages.

The query engine searches for occurrences of keywords in the index and creates a list of documents that contain them. The relevancy/ranking engine is responsible for ordering documents such that, hopefully, those most useful to the user are at the top of the list.