The enterprise search market has grown nearly 12 percent annually since 2008, ending at $1.7 billion in 2012, and it’s projected to reach $1.9 billion by the end of the year. As it continues to grow, the search market is changing with the times, a post on the Formtek blog explains.
Consumer search has demonstrated that users expect to simply type in a few keywords or terms and find exactly what they want. Instead of providing users with a selection of possible choices to pick from, Google and Bing hope to create a more precise user experience and eliminate extraneous work. Many experts predict that search engines will soon be able to offer pictures, documents or verbal responses (a la Apple’s Siri) to deliver answers, the blog post notes.
SharePoint 2013 is trending in this direction. It introduces a much more powerful native search engine based on the FAST Search Server. Enterprises are realizing that having a powerful search engine alone isn’t enough. It must include a meta data and text analytics strategy to bring context to information within the entire search. Enterprise search alone will fail unless you also have the support elements that provide context to the data and the content you’re searching against.
As an example, SharePoint does not provide auto classification, but it does provide a way to include CADs and meta data to your content. It indexes against unstructured content, structured content and social context from discussion boards and news feeds. The system then wraps together an integrated search combining all of those different contextual platforms. Tags through keywords and more structured meta data lists can be added to any of those pieces.
The bottom line is that enterprise search is trying to emulate where consumer search engines like Google and Bing are going. The next step for enterprise search is to be able to provide that final answer for employees and internal consumers. It’s about searching through multiple data sources, not just your intranet or unstructured data, but also for structured data and information in your HRIs or accounting system. Enterprise search aspires to aggregate all of the information together and make it a successful one-stop shop.
Source: Formtek Blog, May 2013
