Search Technologies: Redefining Enterprise Search with Big Data

The multimillion-dollar investments made on enterprise search products have been failing to bear fruit—thanks to the complex implementation procedures, which are undermining the effectiveness of the products in spite of above par technology. Acknowledging this during his tenures at various companies that focused on search engine technologies, Kamran Khan, teamed up with two other search industry veterans to establish Search Technologies. With a mission to “help people get the most out of enterprise search, and build the best enterprise search solutions around,” Search Technologies’ solutions and expertise is enabling hundreds of companies across the globe to use enterprise search to its fullest potential.

Search Technologies is at the heart of the ongoing blend between enterprise search and Big Data. During their various engagements, Search Technologies found the existing enterprise search products to be underperforming in content processing. To fill this void, the firm built Aspire Content Processing, which enables Search Technologies to clean, normalize and enrich the content prior to indexing; resulting in improved relevancy ranking, accurate results sorting among other benefits. They also offer a number of Aspire-derived products such as Advanced Query Processing and Connectors that allow them to build robust search solutions for their clients. “Hadoop plays a vital role in many of our products,” says Khan, President and CEO, Search Technologies. Leveraging Hadoop, they have achieved functionalities that simply were not possible in the past, enabling them to architect more efficient and analytics-based world-class search solutions.

The conscious decision of Search Technologies’ executive team to focus solely on one area–the enterprise search space–has allowed them to stay ahead of the curve. With a customer-centric approach, they constantly vet the market for the best technologies and tailor solutions that help their customers achieve business goals seamlessly. Besides corporate-wide search—a mission critical process in large enterprises, Search Technologies’ offerings are increasingly utilized in the fraud detection, publishing and recruitment arenas.

Reed Business Information (RBI), a provider of business information, data and marketing solutions had been using FAST as a standalone solution to power search across their websites for many years. But FAST lost it relevancy to RBI as it became more Microsoft centric, and they turned to Search Technologies to help them migrate from FAST and onto Solr Lucene, in conjunction with Search Technologies’ Aspire. To achieve one of RBI’s key requirements–the publications using the search service should not have to change their configurations–Search Technologies had to emulate the search functionalities from FAST in Solr. Eventually, Search Technologies successfully moved the entire publications from FAST over to Solr. Graeme McCracken, CIO at RBI says, “We progressively transitioned our sites and services from FAST to Solr over a two-week period, and nobody noticed. At the same time, we reduced our on-going cost-of-ownership by more than half.” Among numerous other successful projects of Search Technologies is their implementation of a comprehensive knowledge management portal for a large IT provider, which today, is working extremely well on a very diverse range of content sources.

We constantly vet the market for the best technologies and build the best enterprise search solutions around

Search Technologies has been growing at a rate of 20 percent per year since its inception, and is intent on sticking to their vision of “being at the forefront of innovation in the search space.” Backed by a team of skilled architects and engineers, Search Technologies is focused on leveraging and implementing the latest technologies to tackle tomorrow’s complicated enterprise search challenges, all the while continuing to grow their global reach.