Enterprise search refers to a subfield of information retrieval and refers to the process of computer-aided content-oriented search with the help of an internal company search engine, which indexes content by means of so-called crawlers. However, the search is usually not performed live on the original data sources, but on the search index. This index primarily includes internal data sources such as documents from various databases and file system entries.
Hits or found documents are displayed as a text excerpt (snippet) in the context of the search query. This preview allows you to quickly assess the relevance of the results. The continuous indexing of the individual data sources ensures that the results are up-to-date (result set). From a company’s point of view, the benefit of enterprise search is to help employees find work-related information.
Also read: Apache Hadoop, Spark Vs. Elasticsearch/ELK Stack
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How Enterprise Search Works
In most cases, search engines consist of three main components: a crawling/indexing engine, a query engine, and a ranking/relevancy engine. The crawling/indexing engine retrieves the documents and data from the sources and stores this information in an efficiently searchable structure. It also creates document caches, which are used to display the document preview in the results view. The query engine searches the index for hits and generates a list of results. The Ranking/Relevancy Engine is responsible for the sorting or order of the hits. As a rule, a web browser is used as the interface and the results are presented in a similar form to that of Internet search engines.
Interfaces of Enterprise Search Works
Many enterprise search vendors offer a wide variety of adaptors or connectors for widely used enterprise applications in order to be able to display the content in the search solution. In addition to direct queries of the customer database, plug-ins for group e-mail applications, content or document management systems, for example, are typical. It is also often possible to integrate it as a separate file system. Often, “Federated Search” connectors are also used, which pass on the search query to a target system and then integrate the obtained partial results into the results.
Components of Enterprise Search Works
In general, a distinction is made between frontend and backend.
In addition to the individual connectors, the backend typically contains the crawler, indexer and parser for the search queries made by the various frontends. These queries are forwarded to the actual search engine, which provides the information from the indexed database.
In the frontend, there is generally greater design freedom. It can simply be an input field, or it can offer more convenience, for example by suggesting suspected typos, displaying other related topics, or navigating through a tag cloud or facet classification. The ever-increasing narrowing of the number of hits by adding additional criteria to the search query or by choosing a sub-term (for example, along a taxonomy tree) is also known as drill-down. The formatting of the result (e.g. splitting into different pages) is typically also done in the frontend. The frontend usually also includes all the pure convenience functions such as the ability to save search queries and resubmit them later.
