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Analysis: Enterprise Search: Page 4 of 26

On top of these core pieces vendors add algorithms that help improve search accuracy. An advanced indexing engine, for example, might index document metadata as well as text. A "fuzzy search" capability may find keywords that are misspelled in documents, while an advanced relevancy algorithm would give more weight to documents with more occurrences of key words in a smaller area.

How It's Built

We noted three basic architectures among the tested products. Most popular were Web-based offerings that are accessed solely through a browser. The products from Google, IBM, Mondosoft, Thunderstone and Vivisimo all fall under this category, with the Google and Thunderstone products configured as appliances.

In a desktop-based architecture, indexes are shared through file shares. This architecture is easier to program because developers don't have to write a complicated client-server communication protocol. Search clients access the index directly. Of course, this can create security problems if you don't carefully control what documents are contained in a shared index. Products from dtSearch and ISYS fall into this category.

Finally, X1 submitted a desktop client-server architecture, where the interface for entering queries is separate from the search engine. That means indexes can be secured with more fine-grained control; in fact, the query interface need not even have direct access to the index because it doesn't access the index directly.