The first of these was building a search for cloud intranets. This in turn opened up new capabilities for our crawler to index data that is otherwise difficult to access and set up a search just as quickly as we do with any regular website. This is very close to crawling private intranets, but we are still in the internet territory. This became a more popular feature than we initially anticipated and our systems evolved to support numerous types of authentication like form auth, NTLM auth, cookie-based auth, IP whitelisting, etc. One such non-standard implementation is our crawling behind login pages feature where we are able to provide a search even if the content is protected by authentication. And because of this, our crawlers have over time gained the ability to index content that does not conform to the standards of the web and still provide a search for them. Having spent a lot of time on internal search engines, we at ExpertRec discovered that the data on the internet is not as structured as it should be. The Road to Building an Intranet Search Tool The tricky part here is finding a search provider that caters to your specific needs. A SaaS solution is the cheaper and more efficient way to go. Even if you manage to build it, now you have the overhead of maintenance and will have to keep updating features with time. On top of this, developing such a system takes time and resources and can get expensive pretty fast. Hence, many intranet search experiences fundamentally work, in that they return results in answer to queries, but they lack relevancy and do not provide a comprehensive search service over intranet content. Although general IT staff should be capable of conducting a basic implementation of an intranet search engine, they typically do not have the specialist knowledge to tune the search system. Turning to open source projects like Solr or Elasticsearch is another option. Google Search Appliance used to be the go-to product for this purpose until it was shut down in 2018. Building a Search For Your Private Intranet Using ExpertRec The Tried and Tested Wayīuilding a Google-like search experience behind a firewall is no easy task. Corporate intranets overcome this issue by using enterprise search tools that often overkill for their requirements and end up burning a lot of money in the process.ģ. In a sense, it requires a more toned-down and specialized version of enterprise search.įrom my first two paragraphs, it is quite clear that there is no well-defined set of requirements out there for an intranet search tool.
These documents may themselves be structured or unstructured, but are generally not spread over multiple software and databases. The users of an intranet more often than not require a search tool that can provide a search on their private documents. Add to more features like access control and other very specific requirements, it is no wonder that enterprise search tools are so expensive. Enterprise search, while itself a vague term, deals with indexing data from multiple sources or software and providing a search on top of it.