Enterprise Search features in Exact Synergy Enterprise

In my previous post I explained why we build our own search engine in Exact Synergy Enterprise. In this blog post I will describe the features we have build in the search engine of Exact Synergy Enterpise.

Image credit: paloaltosoftware

• Relevance ranking. Display the most relevant documents for your search. Relevance ranking of a word in document is based on different components. For instance, the number of times a word exists in a document. Is it part of the title etc....
• Attachment search. Documents can have attachments. These attachments are indexed on the same way as the document content itself.
• Synonyms. Within an Enterprise people can talk about the same things in different ways. For instance, within the company people talk about the Supportdesk. However customers are talking about the helpdesk. Assume a customer is doing a search on your web site for helpdesk, you want to display the contact information document of your Supportdesk. For this situation the Supportdesk is a synonym for Helpdesk.
• Search suggestions also known as Do you mean? Everybody can make type mismatch which you did not realize when you type your keywords. If you type 'debttor' we will suggest 'debtor'.
• Expertise search. Within your company you have people with a lot of knowledge: The Experts. New people in your company, or people on different locations should find these people. The experts are based on the documents they have written. If you do not write documents about your expertise the Expertise search will not find you. The basis for an expert is to share his or her knowledge.

Why did we build our own search engine in Exact Synergy Enterprise?

In Exact Synergy Enterprise we have made major changes to the search logic. Sometimes I got questions from people why we did not implement Google or other available engines. I think this is a valid question. In my previous blog: Why is Enterprise search more complex than we search? I explained the difference between Enterprise search and web search.

In this blog I will explain the main reasons for our own developed search engine:

1. Exact Search engine is integrated in the software. No additional deployments steps are necessary to use the engine.
2. No additional configuration is not needed. Index process is configured out of the box. Only one background job to schedule the indexing process.
3. No additional hardware is needed to use the search engine.
4. Access control of content is integrated in the Exact Search engine.
5. Development costs versus license fee of external search technology.
6. Training of support and consultancy.

Can it happen that we will use an external search engine in the future? Yes, there will be a moment that we will make use of external search technology. If you ask when, I do not know at this moment. We continually follow available products. The quality of the result set is not the only factor for a decision. We will take the mentioned reasons into account.

If you know search engines who has a good answer on the mentioned reasons feel free to contact me.

Why is Enterprise Search more complex than web or desktop search?

Within an enterprise, people expect to find their information, in the same and easy way, as they find their information on the web with Google. During a project I did, to improve the search of Exact Synergy Enterprise, I had one principle:

Search = Find

Why should you store information if you can't find it!

A user will start a search if he expects to find the information he is looking for. This principle applies to the 3 different types of search:
1) Web search. Like Google, Yahoo etc.
2) Desktop search. Search tools to find the content of a user's own computer.
3) Enterprise Search. Search technology to find information within an organization.

Access control to the data is a big difference between Enterprise search and the other 2 search types.  On the Web, everybody is allowed to see the data. On your desktop you are allowed to see all data, because you are the owner. Web and desktop search can index all the data without to take access control into account. Within an Enterprise, access control to data is very important. For instance payroll slips should only be accessible by the HR department and the resource itself. Other people are not allowed to see this payroll slip.

Therefore Enterprise search is a bigger challenge in comparison with web search or desktop search. A lot of tools are available to index your data in your Enterprise. For instance Microsoft Search Server 2008, Fulltext index of SQL Server, Autonomy a leader in Enterprise Search.
However these tools index the data on the same way as web search. They are not aware of the security model in your enterprise application. With these tools, you still need to implement your security model in the search application. In combination with the configuration and deployment of these tools your enterprise application can get very complex.
This is one of the main reasons why we have developed an search engine which is aware of the security model of Exact Synergy Enterprise. However Search, or better Find, is never finished and we are always looking to further improve the search.

Do you also experience the challenge of access control to your data in your search application?
If yes, how have you implemented the security model of your application in your Enterprise Search?