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What is Enterprise Search?

What is Enterprise Search?

What is Enterprise Search? 2560 1707 SearchBlox

What is Enterprise Search?

Important terms to understand and key questions to answer.

If you’re like most people, you use Google multiple times a day, so you’re familiar with web search. But what is enterprise search? Enterprise search is how your organization helps people find the information they need to do their jobs and make decisions. An enterprise search engine enables content from across the enterprise to be indexed, searched and surfaced to authorized users.

Enterprise search helps customer service teams support customers; it helps business analysts spot trends and helps executives uncover important insight. Ideally, enterprise search reduces customer service costs, dismantles information silos and improves operational efficiencies.

At its most basic, enterprise search engines use these five steps:

Crawl: Enterprise search engines “crawl” documents, databases, directories, etc. to collect information and make it available for search.

Index: Next, the search engine creates a searchable index, organizing the information it has collected to enable a faster response.

Query: The user requests information or data from search with a query, which may be a question, a keyword, or a dataset.

Display: The search engine finds the data, ranks it by relevance, and displays it in whatever format your configuration dictates.

Security: Ensure the right users are able to see the right information with the right security privileges.

While the process sounds rather straightforward, choosing an enterprise search vendor often isn’t. Here are three questions to answer that will help you choose.

What features are included?

This question is designed to help you understand the total cost of ownership. Some vendors nickel and dime you for certain functionality, so define your requirements and ask about the following:

    1. Crawlers or Connectors. Many search vendors charge extra for crawlers, making it hard to get accurate pricing for enterprise search.
      • Our pricing includes connectors for more than 150 data sources, including popular tools like Slack, Google Drive, AWS and Salesforce, and more than 40 file formats, from email and mp3 files, to PowerPoint documents and PDFs.​

       

    2. Integrations. Embedded search provides a better user experience. But, again, beware: integrations aren’t always included.

       

    3. Access Controls. Your enterprise manages lots of data, including public, private and sensitive data. Make sure you can control access to the degree you want.
      • We allow you to control access at the user, collection, document and sub-document levels.

       

    4. Language Support: If you have content in more than one language, be sure it’s supported.

       

    5. Encryption. Certain industries, including financial services, healthcare and government, impose stricter security standards on managing customer and citizen data.
      • SearchBlox Platinum Support offers searchable encryption with a Data Privacy Module that allows you to search data while it’s still protected with AES-256 encryption. Every user can search the data, but only privileged users can see the decrypted PII information.

       

    6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Enhancements. Machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) enable enterprise search to do more. What options does the vendor offer?
      • We currently offer two AI products to make search more intuitive. SearchAI SmartSuggest uses AI to offer complete phrases associated with a keyword or phrase instead of just those that start with a keyword or phrase. SearchAI Answers understands natural language questions and provides answers on a search engine results page (SERP), via voice or in a chatbot.

       

    7. Support. Some vendors price support separately so make sure you understand what’s included.
      • We include Premium Support with SearchBlox Enterprise Search. That gives you five support contacts, a four-hour service level agreement (SLA) response time and 24/7 email support. If you need more, you can upgrade to Platinum Support, which includes unlimited support contacts, a one-hour SLA response time and searchable encryption (see “encryption” above).

Where do you want to deploy enterprise search?

    1. Self-managed On-prem
    2. Self-managed in the Cloud
    3. Fully Managed in the Cloud
      • We offer all three options.

How soon will you deploy it? Time to market is important.

    1. We can deploy on-prem solutions and cloud solutions in a matter of days.

We understand how important it is to be confident in your enterprise search engine. That’s why we offer a free 30-day trial that includes support.

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