Search 1.x » Enterprise

Tips On How To Get More Out Of Your Company’s Intranet Search Engine

Felix — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:31:56 +0000

Extending from my previous article on how you can get your company to get a better Enterprise Search Engine for free! Today I want to talk about how you can get the most out of what you have got now.

Even though the type of enterprise search engine available varies significant and the implementation can be quite different from company to company, the fundamental of how to use a search engine more effectively are pretty much the same, whether you have a portal based search engine on your intranet or a specialist search engine for documents, the following tips should make you a better searcher and increase your productivity!

1. Get to Know all the Search Engines: Company typically have more than one search engine, starting with the intranet search engine. Other departments might have created their own specialist search engine that you might find useful. Ask your IT department and uncover all the search engines that you should have access to

2. Read the help page! Every implementation of a corporate search engine would have its own set of features and capabilities. Spending the time and going over the help page is never going to hurt you.

3. Get to know the advanced search syntax: One of the first advanced search function you should get familiar with is the advanced syntax options that available to you. Things like how to to “AND” and “OR” and can you use things like NOT to exclude certain keyword.

4. Get to know what’s in the search engine repository: What type of content? what format are they? It always a good idea on what is actually indexed by the search engine that you are using since if it is not indexed by the search engine, it ain’t gonna show up in the search result !

5. Request for training – Surprisingly, company often spends a large amount of money implementing their corporate search engine and then forgets about training their user on how to effectively use it and get the most of their million dollar IT investment. It’s a shame and its up to the users such as you to change that.

6. Try Desktop Search: Often you have already searched, found and downloaded the document you are looking for previously. Why not avoid the awful Intranet Search Engine all together and search your own desktop with one of these wonderful Desktop Search Engine.

Do you have any ideas or experience you would like to share ?

Also feel free to start your own discussion at the Search 1.x Community Forum!Similar Posts:

Comparison Between Windows and Google Desktop Search

Felix — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:23:40 +0000

I am a fan and heavy user of Google Desktop Search but have always been curios about Windows Desktop Search and wanted to do a comparison between the two. Well, the guys at Download Squad have beaten me to it and done a good job in comparing the latest offerings from Microsoft and Google.

They looked at a number of factors that are important from a user’s point of view including:

Indexing options available
Automatic categorisation of documents
General Ease of Use

Whilst it suggest that Google is slightly faster in query response time (and I can concur that the response time for Google Desktop is certainly lightly fast !), the comparison basically resulted in more or less a draw between both offerings. This is not surprising considering the amount of effort and focus Microsoft has put in in defending its desktop strong hold that is the Windows franchise and the fact that Desktop Search is a relatively simpler technical challenge when compared with Web Search.

One of the main emission from the article is a comparison of the type of documents supported which to be is a HUGE factor. Whilst both offerings states that Lotus Notes is supported as a document source, I would have liked to see a detailed test and analysis just because it is probably the most difficult source it terms of desktop documents.

If you are a user of Lotus Notes and do need to index and search Notes emails, I can personally recommend that you go with Google Desktop Search as it rocks. I use it on a daily basis and only is the indexing process seamless, the results presentation is fantastic and it even allow you to preview the email in the results listing page. Just remember to download the Google Desktop Search Enterprise Edition and enable to the Lotus Notes Plugin after you installed it.

For those of you who have not used or tried Desktop Search technologies, check out this article for a discussion on some of the other desktop search offerings and give it a go as they are a great productivity booster !

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Enterprise Search Engine for Free !

Felix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:04:43 +0000

Have you ever been frustrated with your corporate portal search engine ? or worse still, been wondering why your company doesn’t offer any search engine for corporate information ? One of the excuses used by the IT department has always been cost, cost of software license being the main problem. Well, that excuse is no longer valid !

Whilst there are companies such as Autonomy which sells their enterprise search software for millions of dollars, there are plenty of FREE legitimate alternatives when it comes to enterprise search software now!

1. IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition

IBM has a huge portfolio when it comes to Enterprise Search which are all grouped within the OmniFind brand. From advanced enterprise search with text analytics capability to the freely available OmniFind Yahoo Edition. Truth be told, the freely available OmniFind Yahoo Edition software is actually based on the open source Apache Lucene code, however, IBM has put its weight behind it, packaged it for corporate use and offers basic support. It is super easy to get started and does do a good job against basic web based contents.

2. Google Custom Site Search

Whilst Google does sell it’s Google Search Appliance for a fee, The Google Custom Site Search product is a free custom search offering that allows you to index corporate portals and have it completely hosted by Google. The end user search experience is just like the Google consumer web offerings. You do also have the options to have a paid version if you want to remove the ads that comes with the free version can be able to do some basic customisation.

What’s the catch you ask. Even though web based consumer search has been free and will probably be free forever, there is always a price tag when it comes to enterprise software right ? In most cases, the free offerings is a platform that allows vendors to get themselves in door and try to upsell their premium offerings later on. Some of the main restriction of the free offerings are:

Document index size limitation
Document connector limitations: Type of documents, security features
Advanced Functionalities
Ability to customise the interface
Ads displayed !

If you have a relatively small documentation repository that mainly consists of web pages and can live with the above limitations, then I would say the free offerings are a good fit for you or your company.

On top of the two I mentioned here, I am sure there are tones of other free offerings out there if you look hard enough. So go on, forward this article to your IT department and ask them to step up their game.Similar Posts: