Other pages in the review
If you use a computer, email or the Internet you are no doubt aware of the concept of "search". So you will also then be aware of the searching limitations that come with this.
You can use different search engines to trawl your computer, email, or Internet, and wait patiently while results of varying use or relevance are returned. Outlook’s native search, for example, is a laborious way of finding an email, but this function is only scratching the surface of what good search engines should really be able to do.
A dedicated data search tool is different. It is a big step up that can unify all of these disparate areas into one powerful engine that can quickly and efficiently return results that can, in turn, be further analysed with great accuracy. The capability and the reach of these products is astounding.
By far the most important element of any search engine is how it calculates or defines the relevance of data from your search query. A Web-search tool, for example, often relies on the number of links to a particular site and calculates its relevance based on this—clearly not something that would work if you are searching for data on one of your own servers. In this case the occurrences of keywords and appearance of the keyword in the executive summary or title is more likely to provide a sensible, relevant result.
If you need to handle large amounts of data a good search tool can usually provide a notable productivity boost. Unlike some of the existing native search tools, finding information using specialised engines will be a quick and easy task.
As with any new software, staff will require time to get their heads around using the software efficiently. In some cases just learning how to crawl with the software is a time-consuming process, but once learned it quickly becomes a powerful tool.
In general, search tools include a native ability to read different file types without the need to load any kind of parent application—these should include all of the common file-types used in your business. Imagine if you needed to search your organisation for data but were unsure of what file type it was in. The more file formats natively supported the better. One main distinction between enterprise-class tools and consumer search tools will be the number of file types supported.
When purchasing search software you will want to be certain that your particular file types are supported, and while it is true that many can be customised this is a route you should avoid if you can help it. Customising will cost both time and money and it may well be beyond your IT staff’s capabilities, and require specialised consultants. Then you will have to determine who is going to maintain the customised system.
Another common issue with customisation is if there is any need to repackage or relocate your existing data. Hopefully the search software can search and index the data in situ without any special preparation. And any company will also have a good deal of sensitive data so your search tool will need to conform to your authentication system and restrict access throughout the search.
The complexity in setting up many of these products, as highlighted above, restricted us to a brief overview of just some of the offerings available for this review.
Products reviewed here include: the Google Mini, an appliance eminently suited for small business; the ISYS:desktop, an enterprise-level tool (that resides on your own PC); the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 and IBM’s Omnifind v8.3, both of which are full-blown enterprise level products.
This month we have taken a broad—albeit restricted—look at these products. These four, of course, are not the only players in this market. According to Forrester Research some of the leading enterprise search vendors include Fast Search & Transfer (Enterprise Search Platform 5) and Autonomy, both rated very highly and both at the forefront of large-scale search technology. Endeca also has a great product, and although somewhat in the shadows of these other two it appears to be selling very well.
In addition to these vendors we also invited Convera, described by Forrester as a contender in the space, and Oracle, another strong performer. Unfortunately, due to the sheer scale of some of these products we have limited this review to a small selection. It is a topic we will revisit again in the future.