“The pen is mightier than the sword.” We’ve all heard the old adage about the importance of information in warfare. Well, our data is equally important in business. As our ability to gather and digitize information grows our need to categorize that information for easy access and search grows as well. Certain industries and professions amass information much faster than others. The legal profession, such as a law office with tens or hundreds of attorneys, paralegals and information employees, is an example of a business sector that may be easily overwhelmed with data.

So what do these information intensive industries do to take advantage of all their data rather than be flooded by it? There are industry specific software applications to tag and categorize documents and even cross reference emails with phone calls and court documents. There are also a few solutions from Google search for business, Google Mini, the Google Search Appliance and Google Site Search.

Internal and intranet relevant search results - The Google Search Appliance (GSA)

For a company intranet and internal network the Google’s search Appliance aggregates all data and indexes it for  relevant and familiar search results.  Their description states, “Search across websites, intranets, portals, fileshares, content management systems, and business applications to deliver true “universal” search for your organization.”  The ability to uniformly present data across all your internal resources, including multiple Sharepoint sites,  is something we’ve seen needed at several client locations.  The larger enterprise Google Search Appliance 6.0 can easily handle 1 million documents while the Google mini is marketed towards the firms with approximately 300,000 documents.

We’ll definitely hear more about corporate and company wide search in the future from industry specific vendor offerings as well as from some of the search giants like Google.  Information is coming from more and more diverse platforms, such as twitter, blogs and online publications, and the ability to present a unified search result of that data is essential for businesses to succeed.