Testing

This is not a direct programming question so please move to another forum if its in a wrong place.

Well I am looking for ideas as to a software that would help me analyse some results.

I work for a mid sized company that is looking for invest in enterprise search. As a result we are looking at evaluating several possible solutions. Does anyone know any software packages that we can use to evaluate, analyze & compare the results from the various enterprise search solutions ?

Thanks

Google: search+benchmarks

Good luck. The search space is large and varied. Even the goals of the top few search engines are different. Benchmark comparisons would be subjective at best. Since most of them use proprietary algorithms that are not completely documented, you can't really evaluate those directly. Even where they are fairly well documented, the parameters that drive them are generally trade secrets and probably vary on the order of minutes, hours, days and months as their grids expand and their cache's are optimized (and probably a dozen other dimensions I can't even fathom at the moment).

Market forces dominate the search space. Right now they favor Google. That could change later as consumers become more sophisticated and demanding, but they are likely just going to need more variety of algorithms to meet their needs (ie, solutions for ever diminishing market sizes) and that means who-ever can afford to identify, buy or license those technologies will win in the market. The unsolved problem at the moment (as far as I know) is automating the selection of the best algorithm for a particular consumers query.

The number of patents an entity holds in the search space is probably a good leading indicator.