Understanding enterprise search

Hi, my name's Brian Babineau. I'm an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group and I've been covering the information management software market for the past four years, including enterprise search. Today I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how enterprise search works; to truly understand enterprise search.

Now what we're talking about today is not web searches, like your Googles and Yahoos. Let me give you an example of an enterprise search activity. Let's say we need to find the one email that Martha Stewart sent to her broker about Imclone. That'd be a very difficult task if we were using basic web tools to do that.

First, why do we need enterprise search tools? We need it to retrieve information. And why do we retrieve information? Well number one, we lost it or we deleted it. The second, as in the Martha Stewart cases, some external party like a lawyer or a regulator wants us to produce it.

Now that we know why we need to retrieve information and understand our information a little bit better, let's talk about what we're going to be searching. What types of information formats? Now as I said, we all equate web pages to search, but in reality, enterprise information encompasses three types: number one, emails; number two, structured data; and finally one that we all know, our Microsoft Office and general purpose files. These information formats comprise our enterprise information, thus we're going to need to search them.

Now let's talk a little bit about the back end of search. When we need to search something, we need to have an index to actually locate our data specific files. We can build an index in two ways, attribute index or content index. Now there are pluses and minuses to either of these formats and I'll go through those real quickly.

First an attribute of data descriptors. Data descriptors may be the file name, the owner, when it was created. This index is very small. And the pluses are you can search it quickly, find things faster and you don't have to store as much information. The minuses are you can't really do keyword searches or number patterns. Full content indexing means you analyze all of the data within the file, all of the words. It's a bigger index. The pluses are you can do keywords. But searches take longer because we're going against a much larger subset of data.

Today I've talked about the why we need to search our enterprise information, what we're going to search, the different files, and then how we're going to search them. So the next time when you're looking for that email or you need to produce that file as a part of discovery, you can do so quickly meeting your business requirements.