Replacing Your Legacy Enterprise Search? Read This First.

Google has announced that it’s sunsetting the Google Search Appliance. Are you using it? Microsoft is sunsetting FAST. Are you using it?

Here’s the thing. The search market is changing, and the vendors know it. That’s why you are seeing major changes in the traditional search market. More importantly, though, you are noticing that traditional search simply isn’t giving you the information you need.

Traditional search was good, it indexed content and allowed you to perform quick searches. But it’s not that straightforward today. The amount of information you collect and create in your company is growing. It’s stored in multiple repositories and business systems. Some of it is secure and can only be seen by certain people.

You know you need a new search solution. But what exactly do you look for when starting your search (pardon the pun)? We’ve outlined seven critical capabilities in our new eBook, 7 Key Considerations for Legacy Search Replacement.

Here’s a quick look at them:

1. Big Data Scale & Reliability: It’s all about connecting all your data sources, including the secure ones. Your solution needs to scale as your data grows and deliver reliable performance.
2. Comprehensive, Robust Data Source Ingestion: Native integration with apps you use every day is critical, and you don’t want to set up custom integrations, every time, so out of the box connectors are key.
3. Extensible Data & Query Transformation: The data you upload is good, but sometimes you need to enrich your queries and data, and that means you’ll want built in tools and capabilities to transform your data.
4. Dynamic Content Unification & Analytics: It’s not just about connecting data sources in a single window, it’s about making the right connections between those data sources to improve the quality of your results. Here we are talking about capabilities such as machine learning and analytics.
5. Intelligent, Data-Centric Security: Some of your data will be secure, but you need to include it because it’s necessary to get the best results. The key is ensuring only the right people have access to that secure data.
6. Flexible User Experience & Solution Acceleration: Many applications you develop for your employees have a strong search component. The ability to integrate your search application within these apps is critical, and that means having a framework and robust SDK.
7. Adaptive Learning-based Relevance & Collaboration: You want your search to get smarter as it’s used. Machine learning, text analytics, and natural language processing are key to making this happen. Oh, and you want much more than a list of results – you want real answers.

When you start to look at your requirements for search, you may find you need all of these capabilities from the beginning. Or maybe you only need one or two. At some point though, your requirements will grow and evolve as your business does, and you’ll be happy you found a search solution that supports all of these.

Get more details on the seven critical elements to your next search solution. Download 7 Key Considerations for Legacy Search Replacement.