Modern businesses thrive on electronic information. But as time passes, this is information that piles up in server directories, effectively locked away for good, as no one can remember what HV365-1093.DOC actually contains, and nobody really has the time to look

But what if it was the text of a document that won substantial amounts of business, or the original memo that defined the firm's current business model?

Keeping track of what is in all those megabytes of files is complex. Not everyone wants to use a document management system. But there's value in understanding what information is available. It's time to bring another Web technology back inside the firewall.

The Google search engine now accounts for a large percentage of all the searches carried out on the Web. What businesses need is an enterprise Google of their own, able to crawl through file systems and intranet servers.

It's not surprising that Google is already in this market with the Google Search Appliance, a stand-alone search tool that will search any Web servers in a business's network. Two-hundred different file types can be indexed, including output from common productivity suites such as Microsoft Office. Bright yellow single rack units, Google's appliances can index 150,000 to 15 million documents. Firms such as National Semiconductor are using Google appliances to manage large-scale information intranets.

E-government is also getting results from implementing Google's yellow search systems, including the much-praised San Diego implementation. Here, a $20,000 (€17,609)investment in a single server opened its information stores to the general public as well as intranet users.

Solutions such as Google's can be expensive, though not as expensive as implementing a Verity or Autonomy search solution. The high-end of search technology, both systems offer advanced document search based on sophisticated Bayesian search techniques.

While Google's tools are restricted to working with Web servers, Autonomy's enterprise search tools can search file systems, databases, email servers and document stores.

This opens up a larger selection of documents, though there's work required in choosing which servers are to be searched and how information will be delivered. Firms that have standardised on Microsoft technologies can take advantage of the extended search tools built into SharePoint Portal Server. These can crawl file systems, Web and mail servers.

There are also open source enterprise search solutions. A free, GPLed, search tool is ht://dig. This will index Web documents across a multi-server intranet, though external parsers are required to index other document types.

A big problem facing organisations is the different systems they want to index. Compatibility is key as information will be stored in different formats, and inside as many different applications. Full access to all files does not come cheap, but good results can be achieved by just improving access to common document types.

Once a system has been widely accepted, then it is time to dig out legacy information from obsolete stores, convert it to current formats and make it available to the index. - (Guardian Service)