Most people associate search with Google or Yahoo. But enterprise search is a different type of solution.
Web search
Word association – when someone says ‘search’, is your next thought ‘Google?’ How Google works: People who create public web sites design them to be found. Google indexes mostly homogeneous html pages that contain metadata and special tags. Moreover, the strength of Google’s search engine is based, in large part, on an algorithm that tracks how sites are linked to other sites. In a simplified case, the more incoming links a page/site has, the higher the ranking in search results.
Enterprise Search
Enterprise information often resides in non-interconnected and even legacy systems, in a wide variety of file formats. Data is located in internal directories, emails, manuals, technical specifications, CMS (content management software), CRM (customer relationship management) software, and the list goes on (and on). Compare enterprise data to the html pages that Google searches. Where is the network of links? Where are the metadata tags that help Google find pages? In most cases, they don’t exist.
Paper about Enterprise Search Basics (pdf:157,797)