Enterprise Search from Microsoft - Comparison
Microsoft has three main offerings in the enterprise search space, from small scale search to solutions that are scalable to support extremely demanding search challenges. The table below, taken from the Microsoft Enterprise Search website, gives an overview of the three solutions.
Best-in-class enterprise search
for the most demanding applications
The ability to enhance your content at the time of indexing—through content processing capabilities such as format conversion, language detection, and entity extraction—significantly increases the information's value to your users.
You need extreme scale—sub-second response time with the ability to handle millions to billions of documents.
Your user experience is critical to your business performance.
You need advanced linguistics support, such as support for Asian languages.
You want to integrate high-end enterprise search with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (optional).
Enterprise search tightly integrated
with a business productivity infrastructure
You want an out-of-the-box solution that delivers the most frequently demanded search features.
Streamlined integration with your business productivity infrastructure is critical to your strategy and your return on investment (ROI).
You need the ability to handle millions of documents with quick response times for the average user.
Enterprise search available as a free download
You need a quick and easy enterprise search solution that can be set up in minutes.
Speed and ease of implementation are more important than scale and sophistication of the solution.
You want a risk-free opportunity to experiment with enterprise search on a limited scale.