Pandia will soon publish The Landscape of Enterprise Search, an ebook giving up to date advice on how to choose the best enterprise search solution for your organization.

The Landscape of Enterprise Search is written by Stephen Arnold, one of the leading experts on enterprise search solutions. You can follow him on his Beyond Search blog.

What is enterprise search?

Enterprise search are search technologies developed for companies and organizations that need search solutions for all the data their employees produce, being that data found on company web sites, in intranets, in house databases and other types of content.

Enterprise search faces different challenges than web search, both as regards the technology underpinning the search engines and the way search results are aggregated and presented.

The book will present reviews of the major providers of enterprise search solutions. In other words: companies, NGOs and public organizations may use the book to identify services that fit their needs.

Recent trends in enterprise search

Enterprise search has lagged web search in certain features.

First, enterprise search has shifted from a “one size fits all” solution to an enabler within applications. Search based applications are delivering functionality that put information at a user’s fingertips. Autonomy and Exalead are leaders in this field, although other firms are shifting to this orientation as well.

Second, enterprise search is no longer focused on laundry lists. New versions of well known systems now perform “mash up” operations between structured and unstructured data. The “outputs” are reports or visualizations. On the surface, these systems look like business intelligence, but solutions from Endeca for example blend traditional outputs with a variety of report formats.

Third, the enterprise vendors have moved beyond search displays from Bing.com and Google.com. Instead of segregating results by content type, enterprise systems display integrated and deduplicated results lists. A vendor with effective technology for federation and deduplication is Vivisimo.

The fourth trend is the use of a platform to perform social functions. Although many vendors assert the social functionality of the information retrieval systems, Microsoft has been among the most successful vendors making sales of a content platform with search plus collaboration features.

These trends are not the only ones that dot the landscape of search, but they identify some major features in a very dynamic landscape.

The book will include a thorough analysis of these trends.

UPDATE June 5: The book is now ready. Click here for more information on the Landscape of Enterprise Search!