What Is Enterprise Search and Why Is It Important?

Information is only as useful as it is accessible. If you search for something, finding it should not be complicated.

This concept can apply to a wide array of user experiences, all of which are meaningful. This is especially true for employees who work with a large knowledge base or internal data in their business. They may not be doing product searches like one might do on Amazon or Google, however they are bringing the same expectations of ease, accessibility, and personalization when it comes to their own search experiences.

Delivering a hyper-personalized experience with super-specific search functionality for business is referred to as enterprise search.

What is enterprise search?

Imagine being a knowledge worker in a data-heavy sector. This could be financial services, manufacturing, or just about any B2B industry. One of your biggest concerns is access to information. You are working in multiple applications. You are touching radically different kinds of content. The speed, security, and accuracy of that accessibility has a direct impact on your ability to do your job. Plain and simple.

Enterprise search is the technology behind knowledge management that connects knowledge workers with the information they seek. Whether it is a customer service agent that needs to frequently pull information for a ticket or a banker pulling important fund data, enterprise search is meant to make seeking and finding internal information easier.

Why is enterprise search important?

Okay, maybe the importance of enterprise search feels a bit self-evident. But there’s a critical point to be made here – how your enterprise search functions makes all the difference. With all of the above in mind, it becomes obvious when search is going wrong fairly quickly. It often looks like this:

• No one can find anything. Your employees make searches and hit terrible results. As legacy search systems age, search results become worse.
• Your UI is terrible. Let’s not be shy about it – if it hurts to look at, it will hurt to work with. Things need to connect in an intuitive way that makes sense.
• Everything is siloed. Still? This is a critical pain point that tears through the whole organization – that part isn’t new. But when it comes to search, it’s still surprisingly common. In many cases, information retrieval is happening across several different applications and cobbled together.

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, companies looking to boost business productivity and drive critical insights need more than just another search tool. They need a meaningful, comprehensive digital experience platform that makes their lives easier.

The following are three critical capabilities of an enterprise search platform to make this happen:

1. Keywords and key phrases: These are among the most familiar components of the search experience. A query parser receives a query and translates it into parameters for a search algorithm, which is executed across a specialized database.
2. Faceting: This allows users to filter results efficiently based on a specific field. This is especially great for limiting a search to a category or department. Faceting is also useful for range filtering, such as with dates or prices.
3. Signal capture: This is the capture of user behavior data, known as “signals.” In most search applications, signals include all the little actions a user takes – queries, clicks, adds, purchases, and other similar data.

Want to learn more about what a powerful enterprise search platform can do for your brand? At Lucidworks, we believe great digital experiences start with the search bar. Whether you are a customer looking for the perfect product or an employee looking for a critical piece of knowledge, finding what you are looking for should be seamless.

Contact us today to learn more about Lucidworks enterprise search solutions.