Designing Modern Enterprise Search Solution –Part 1

This article would be a two part series.

1. Part 1 – 5 requirements that will force you to adopt an enterprise search engine.
2. Part 2– Addressing Enterprise search requirements with open source search platforms.

Part 1 – 5 requirements that will force you to adopt an enterprise search engine.

1. Search over diverse content sources- An enterprise may need a search over diverse content sources including databases, document store, emails, JIRA, SharePoint and content management systems. A smart search solution should be capable enough to crawl these sources and make content searchable.
2. Modern Search features- Now a days google has become benchmark for advance search features like Autosuggest, Did you mean “AAA”.
3. Support powerful UI- To build a powerful search interface faceting (filters for search results) is must. I would be better if search engine provide responses in JSON so that
4. Performance- For e.g. most of the searches below 100 ms.
5. Full text search- With full text, search engine just do not match user specified term with 100% precision like “SQL like”. A full text search gives you flexibility to tune down the precision for better recall. Three full text realted concepta are  tokenization, stemming and ranking. Tokenization is Splitting a text into words, phrases and tokens. Generally it is done based on language grammar.