Hello everyone,
I am asked to either deploy or develop an enterprise (intranet) search engine which could index all web pages of a couple of internal servers, and have a search portal to display all related content, like what Google is doing but for intranet.
Any advice how to develop or deploy quickly? I have heard of Microsoft FAST product, not sure whether it is for this purpose?
thanks in advance, George
The google search appliance is a hardware solution that you might be interested in checking out.
A software based approach could be the Lucene search engine.
A free Microsoft solution is Microsoft Search Server Express. Works similar to the search in SharePoint.
Depending on the level of polish you need, the Nutch project would be an almost turn-key solution for you. http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/
George,
It sounds like you're in a big hurry.
You better start setting expectations on re-work, re-work, re-work.
I highly recommend that you spend time now to
establish the requirments, possibly as basic, middle and blue-sky
determine what search engines, front-ends, crawlers, etc., (either open-source or vendor-provided), can really met your requirments
determine the available support for those tools, and the likelyhood of getting timely and workable answers or work-arounds (Open-source at least doesn't come this a support contract)
don't try to do it all at once. Do the smallest data-set first, regardless of how far up in mgmt your sponsor is. You won't have spent months doing tests only to discover a fatal large-scale flaw in the system, or your plan
comnunicate to your team and sponsors by creating a roadmap to your various levels or requirments, with check-points
As far a pre-planning for even a small-to-medium corporate search project, I highly recommend Martin White's , 'Making Search Work'.
I think you'll find that the ranking and relevance are the one of the if-iest parts of getting a good search solution delivered. Engines probably provide similar functionalities, but the details of how to do it will be different, AND more importantly, the success that you have with forcing relevance will only partly be a function of the search engine that you pick. Put another way, if your text is not in harmony with the search-engines algorithm, you'll spend a lot of time trying to understand various tuning parameters, and their combinatorics. (I'm only familiar with 2 so far, so others are welcome to contradict this).
It's a great learning experience. Good luck.
FAST is a great enterprise search product. It usually ranks top on all the consulting firms evaluations. It does require a moderate amount of technical setup and support though.
Google is another solid product but it is very expensive. It requires a less technical support, but also gives you less control of the search results.