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What is Enterprise Search ?

An enterprise search is an intuitive search for the intranet, which is often adapted to individual company requirements. It is about searching for information within a company, such as documents, emails, databases, customer data, etc. All intranet users can search the documents indexed therein, while adhering to complex authorization models. The indexed data rarely comes from the extranet but comes from source systems that are not accessible from the outside.

Here we list some features of Enterprise Search:

• Various source systems that are searched and indexed, including content management systems, databases, emails, or (still widespread) file shares
• User permissions to control access, where users can only find what they have access to in the source system
• Linguistics and natural language processing to make it easier to formulate search queries
• A suitable search interface, which is tailored to the needs of the company, and which is easily accessible from the intranet, as well as from all other important tools
• Editorial management, such as recommended links, synonyms, spelling correction

Connectors and crawlers are needed for a successful enterprise search. These help to extract relevant information and keep it in sync with the database in the search engine, making it easier for the search engine to react quickly and effectively to queries and display the required results.

What’s the Difference Between Enterprise Search and Google Search?

Enterprise Search and Google Search differ in a few important aspects:

1. 1. Target group: The target group of an Enterprise Search are the own employees with the multitude of their roles. Within an Enterprise Search users search the corporate network for specific content such as documents, emails, process documentation or help articles. The target group for the Google Search is all Internet users and is therefore much broader.
   2. Data sources: The Enterprise Search only refers to the company network and can only search content in this network. If necessary, some websites, like the corporate website, can also be crawled, but never the entire Internet. On the other hand, Google search captures a large part of the content from the publicly accessible Internet, but not private company networks.
   3. Access control: An enterprise search reflects the authorization concepts of the indexed source systems via the connectors and the so-called security trimming. This means that certain content can only be found by authorized users. With Google Search, there is no built-in access control and it is possible for anyone to find content.
   4. Personalization: An enterprise search is usually easily adapted to the company, e.g. to the corporate design, but also to specific user groups depending on interests, location and tasks. Google Search continuously adapts to user behavior. In addition to current trends, the location of the user or his usage history also play a major role.

The size of the indexed documents in an enterprise search is significantly smaller than the size of the indexed websites on Google. Enterprise search involves a few million up to a hundred million indexed documents – with Google this would be 130 trillion.

In short, Enterprise Search is specialized search designed to run within businesses and for their employees, while Google Search is general Internet search open to the public.

What Are the Advantages of Enterprise Search?

For many companies, knowledge is a central asset and an important goal that knowledge is reused. It also often happens that users within a company save their documents inconsistently, i.e., save their documents under different names, in different folders and file formats. So, the difficulty here is to keep the general overview and find the relevant documents and knowledge when you need it, regardless of the location.

An enterprise search can be easily set up and used. After entering the search query, employees not only receive relevant search results, but they can then refine the search even further. For example, filters are used here for the author or the recipient, the creation date, the file format, or the storage location. By using these filters, the user can narrow down their search for specific documents, e.g. project documentation, customer information, the canteen menu or the annual turnover of his company.

There are many other advantages through a good user experience. For example, using “best bets” or “recommended links” where relevant links are displayed first in the result list. “Best bets” can either be selected manually by administrators or based on certain criteria, automatically by the search engine. This allows users to find relevant information faster and more effectively with these features.

Would you like to get in touch and get direct advice on Enterprise Search and other topics related to the IT landscape? Then contact us directly or call +49 211 55 02 66 0.