HOW ENTERPRISE SEARCH WORKS - Page 2

Connectors

Allow search engines to gather information from various sources (structured databases, unstructured documents on internal and remote servers, desktop computers) in your enterprise as well as the external web. Specialized connectors are available for almost every type of file format and application, and custom connectors can be designed as needed.

Relevancy Tools

Build a customized ranking model that delivers content based on concepts, context, date, authority, completeness, geography, statistics, and quality. Tune each element to match your business needs.

Linguistics Tools

Identify synonyms (search for "Great Britain" will include results for "England" as well), abbreviations, phrases, idioms, part of speech, and misspellings. Lemmatization matches regular and irregular grammatical forms. Type in 'goes,' and you can also find 'went.' Prefixes and suffixes can be disregarded, if needed. Certain words can be skipped. The system knows the difference between the 'wind that blows' and 'wind your watch.' Phonetic search allows you to find results based on phonetic similarities, especially useful for names. The system can recognize queries containing who, what, where, when, or why, and provide appropriate results.

Sentiment analysis

Determine if a document has a negative or positive tone. Use this tool to monitor user groups, to analyze reviews of your products and services, or to follow press coverage of your business.

Business rules

Each organization has specific guidelines for how it does business, and these guidelines can be implemented in an Enterprise Search solution. If you have, for example, two levels of advertisers who pay for placement, the higher level advertiser can be assigned to appear in a separate format on top of the results list. When customers have worked with you before, use business rules to determine which search results are most relevant to their specific needs.

Performance, Scalability and High Availability

Enterprise Search needs to be fast, and it needs to be reliable. TnR Global designs your hardware specifications to meet speed requirements and to offer a failover option in case of power outages or server issues. Search engine architecture is scalable, and you can increase index capacity, indexing rate, and/or query processing speed as needed.

Benchmarking

You can't manage what you don't measure.
One of the most valuable tools in Enterprise Search is the ability to learn from the system and measure results. With benchmarking, you track how your users respond to the search engine, and how the search engine responds to them. Metrics include click counting, hardware performance, and quantity of data searched. You can track which queries return no results and then tweak synonyms or taxonomy to provide answers to these queries.

Security

Security is a vital component for any enterprise application. With Enterprise Search, security guidelines apply both to the documents and to the user. Each set of documents can have its own security settings. You can restrict documents from the search engine, or allow the search engine to index the documents, but restrict access to certain groups of users. Security checks are performed when a set of results is queried and as the indexer crawls the data source.

Usability

Search needs to be easy to work with if you expect ordinary people (not just programmers and masochists) to benefit from it.

A few examples of usability:

A query/search field needs to be clearly visible on the page where users are prompted to search for information.

If a query returns too many results to be useful, the user can choose to 'drill down' to the essentials. They can limit the search to English language documents, or document created in the past 30 days, or documents only from the finance department. Custom qualifiers can be defined.

When a search for 'doors' returns thousands of results, a navigation tool on the side will provide helpful links to the different categories - aluminum doors, wooden doors, folding doors, garage doors, etc. When you choose aluminum doors from the list, the next menu allows you to limit results by size of door, by manufacturer, by location, etc.

Pre-defined searches can automatically check new data and send an email to the user, or an alert to a mobile phone.

With so many features available, it is vital to implement a customized Enterprise Search solution based on an in-depth study of your needs. TnR Global engineers can help you at any stage of development: selecting between proprietary vendors and open source solutions, hardware options, level of upgrades, etc.