Can Enterprise Search Engines Become Successful in Online Search?
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Can Enterprise Search Engines Become Successful in Online Search?

27th June 2011

And now for something completely different. It is not something we talk about often here on State of Search, enterprise search. It after all is a whole different ball game compared to the search engines we discuss here, right? Even though both Google and Microsoft have enterprise search engines you can buy and implement on your own organization, it is not the area you usually connect them with.

And yet it is a big business which is closely related to our business, after all, it is all search ;). This week I received a copy of a new ebook on enterprise search solutions, published by Pandia. That book takes a look at different enterprise search solutions and compares them. Very useful and it got me thinking.

It was an interesting read, especially because it is not a field I currently move in a lot, and also because I used to do a lot of CMS-selections, trying to figure out which CMS was best for a client. I then also used comparison articles, reports and made comparisons myself. And it is always interesting to see how others compare.

The ebook (you can get it here by the way) compares Autonomy, Endeca, Exalead, Google Search Solutions, Microsoft/Fast and Vivisimo and also looks at alternative vendors. The comparison is interesting, but also their look into the future. It looks like the enterprise search world is waiting for a shift. “Marketers and procurement teams are hopeful that one or more of these trends will reshape the market in order to make enterprise search a success,” and ” the sharp increase in rich media will make many existing enterprise search applications warp and buckle” are the lines in the report which shows they are ‘searching’ for the right direction.

Reading this ebook made me think: would it be possible for one of these vendors to make a move to ‘our’ world and use their experience in enterprise search into ‘regular’ search? Or is that the lamest idea you ever heard? I hadn’t thought of it before today so I figured this would be a good question for our next poll, so without revealing my opinion on this:

[poll id=”6″]

looking forward to your answers!

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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