Guide to finding the right search solution

the information they need.

When considering the effort your business is willing to support, consider these questions:

-- How many people will be required to manage the tool, and will they be trained subject-matter experts or can they be part-timers who multiplex across other duties?

-- How stable is the solution and what day-to-day maintenance is required? Do you need a high degree of administrator intervention?

-- How much control do you need to exercise over the management of your information?

-- How often do changes need to be made to the way you access information?

-- What sort of results presentation do you need to make the fastest business decisions?

It is also important to determine what ongoing support will require. For example, if you want to add another content repository to a search application that is already running, you may have to bring down the whole application and re-index all the information as if starting from scratch. Which brings us to scalability.

Scalability

The third leg of the search stool is scalability. Interestingly, two major factors of scalability are its connectivity and the effort required to implement and maintain it. A scalable solution connects to a variety of data sources, requires limited touch to keep it functioning and can be easily configured and reconfigured as needed.

Here are a few questions to ask to make sure a solution can adapt to the business rather than vice versa:

-- How much control do you have over applications? How extensible is the solution?

-- Can you add search fields/data sources to the index without having to rebuild? Can you modify any index field without having to re-index the entire document?

-- Can you add hardware as needed without having to reconfigure your existing system?

-- How complete is the API?

-- How easy is backup and rollback?

These baseline questions will help you home in on the "right" search solution that will optimize your ability to access information crucial to business decision making. The bottom line: You want to find a tool that is easy to deploy, manage and use but that offers levels of scalability, performance, sophistication and connectivity that fit with your IT environment. This way, you can really make your data sing.

Doscher is CEO of Exalead (www.exalead.com).