Refining enterprise search

Anyone who has been transfixed by a gymnast or a figure skater knows that the magic happens when they perform flawlessly and yet make it seem easy. That's how a search should work: Enter a query, and the right results appear in simple, elegant fashion -- even if it took countless hours of preparation to make the magic possible. Yet most enterprise users still stumble as they try to extract data from multiple repositories, each with its own search engine. Enterprises seem awash in a rising tide of structured and unstructured data. And even though users are often forced to tag documents manually across various content management systems in hopes that those documents will be easier to retrieve, searches still yield a surfeit of irrelevant, time-wasting results.