The Enterprise Approach to Search

A French search company believes the key to better Web-based search comes from the corporate world.

Exalead, a Paris-based company, is experimenting with a new search model. It believes that by combining the approach of "enterprise" search and Google-like page-ranking search, individuals will be able to surf the ever-expanding Web more thoroughly and efficiently.

Enterprise search, which scours the intranets of institutions, has been the previous focus of Exalead's products. It differs from Google's page-ranking Web search approach: Google's tack is to give a higher rank to Web pages with more incoming links, explains Dan Gruhl, research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. This approach has created a "dark" Web, however, in which a large amount of data goes unread. Companies don't have the luxury of having all of their documents ranked, Gruhl says, and therefore page ranking algorithms "work pretty poorly" in the enterprise search environment.

In contrast, enterprise search software finds relevant items by processing an entire document or file "as a concept," Gruhl says. It's able to extract the meaning of a document, instead of just scanning it for key words. This allows the engine to search for terms in documents that weren't even entered by the user. For instance, if an employee at a pharmaceutical company searches for "aspirin," the search software would extend the search to "pain killers" and "COX inhibitors" as well.

This is the crux of Exalead's blending of a Web-based and an enterprise search approach, with the entire set of search features needed to find a specific file applied at the user-search level.

Using Exalead, an individual has a variety of options: searching by phonetic spelling, by six different languages, by specific document type (.pdf or .doc are two examples), and by date, continent, or country.

While many of these features are similar to Google's "Advanced Search option," Exalead also offers a "related terms section," in case the initial search terms don't bring up the intended results. This enables what François Bourdoncle, the company's CEO, calls "serendipitous search," in which a person can find something even when he or she doesn't ask the right question.

These related terms help distinguish Exalead from Google's advanced search, by allowing users to start at one search query and progressively narrow it down. For instance, a search on "greenhouse effect" could yield the related term "greenhouse gases." From there, a user can further narrow the search to geography, or types of document, for example. Then, one could return to the initial search and narrow down again, using a different related term.

Still, searching the Web effectively, even with this hybrid approach, is not technologically easy, Bourdoncle says, and it has taken his team of engineers -- many of whom came from Alta Vista, the Internet's first viable search engine -- about eight years to put in place.