Search as a service is a branch of

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

(SaaS), focussed on

enterprise search Enterprise search is the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources, such as databases and intranets, searchable to a defined audience. "Enterprise search" is used to describe the software of search information within an ente ...

or site-specific

web search Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

The need for search

Searching is an important part of any business database function, either through internal databases, internal document stores, or through the content of a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

. This is needed for both internal company staff and for external customers. Although a simple database query such as "List existing customers with a

postal code A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, included in a postal a ...

for

Argleton Argleton was a phantom settlement that appeared on Google Maps and Google Earth but was later removed by Google. The supposed location of Argleton was between the A59 road and Town Green railway station within the civil parish of Aughton in We ...

" is a trivial piece of

in-house software In-house software is computer software for business use within an organization. In-house software can be developed by the organization itself or by someone else, or it could be acquired. In-house software however may later become available for com ...

development, probably through SQL, this is a simplistic example. More complex searches such as "Find all product brochure text that references the

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product" or "Search the customer-uploaded reviews for any synonyms of 'caught fire' and 'pets' or 'children'" are more difficult to implement. Search, especially free text search or text searching through images of scanned documents, is a specialist discipline.

Externally-provided search services

By outsourcing the search function to a specialist search company through

, a more capable search function may be available to even the smallest organisation. Two methods are popular for this:

Web-mediated search

One method searches a company's publicly visible web presence. An existing search engine such as

Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

is encouraged to web crawl this site, as they would normally do so anyway. A link to the company's favoured search partner is coded onto their web site as a simple HTML

web form A webform, web form or HTML form on a web page allows a user to enter data that is sent to a server for processing. Forms can resemble paper or database forms because web users fill out the forms using checkboxes, radio buttons, or text fields. ...

or search box. When a query is submitted, this search box searches the main Google (or other) corpus for the text string, but ''only'' for results from that particular web site. These results are then displayed on the site's page, as if they were returned by the site itself. This feature is very easily implemented: the search form simply includes a site: qualifier in the query string passed to the search engine.

Search as a service

The second method is more sophisticated, although more complex. It can support enterprise search too, searching through private resources that are not visible to the public web. Only this form is commonly termed 'Search as a service'. A search provider company offers a search service and a contract is agreed with the client to support their searches. The client then uses the provider's

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

to upload content data or indexing metadata (if already available) for the content to be searched. The provider then constructs a search index for this content. If the content is free text data or similar

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

, then it is first tokenised by

Lucene Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...

, or similar process. Search as a service may also be particularly useful for mobile applications, where the client device is limited for storage, processing speed and connection bandwidth. This approach is taken by

Algolia Algolia is a proprietary search engine offering, usable through the software as a service (SaaS) model. Company Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France. It was originally a comp ...

, a popular player in the field. Alternately, newer service providers lik
ExpertRec
ref> have further simplified the approach by avoiding having to upload data via API and instead by having data extracted by a crawler and then tokenised by Lucene/Solr.

Federated search

Search as a service should not be confused with

federated search Federated search retrieves information from a variety of sources via a search application built on top of one or more search engines. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines ...

, such as Z39.50. These are also services where an agent queries one or more external search engines. In these cases, however, the search engine providers are closely

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to the content databases. The remoting service passes only the query and the results, not the content metadata to populate the search indexes.

Notes

References

{{Reflist Internet search engines Semantic Web As a service