Enterprise Search: A New Dimension in Information Retrieval

Prior to the 1980's, the primary focus in the field of Information Retrieval was document retrieval and finding the exact documents matching the user's needs, from his desktop. However, since 1980 with the invention of the Internet, there has been a paradigm shift with much of this data being transferred online. The amounts of data available on the Internet has been growing exponentially with more than two billion unique, publicly accessible web pages on the Internet. With this ever growing data, the need for finding important data also increased and this lead to inception of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! to fetch this data online. Consequently, with new and improved search algorithms for these search engines, the web search today has improved tremendously, with millions of results being generated within seconds. However, these search engines that crawl the web do not access the internal data of a company, that is confidential and being circulated in its ecosystem. This data includes its databases, intranet websites, portals etc. The process of accurately retrieving data from the internal ecosystem of an organization is called as Enterprise Search. Over the last few years, research in the field of Enterprise Search has often been overlooked. This has led to quite a few problems with organizations failing to manage all its data spread across various platforms. In this paper, we try to bring Enterprise Search back into limelight, by stressing its importance as a full-proof solution for managing an organization's data. This is done by shedding light on the recent research in Enterprise Search, the challenges it faces, its advantages over conventional search solutions. Finally, we provide a comprehensive survey of the various Enterprise Search systems available in the market, and their features. The motive behind this paper is to encourage the employment of Enterprise Search systems in every organization, owing to the potential benefits it provides to its employees as well as the productivity of the company as a whole.