Intranet search engine frontend?

Question

We are currently using a number of open source and commercial products to store different type of information (in our internal network). All these products come with their own repositories (usually a database) and their own search capabilities and store different type of information.

Currently the list of products is as follows:

• Wordpress
• Jira
• Confluence
• Sharepoint
• Dynamics AX
• Moodle

The problem we are facing is that when one needs to search for information, one needs to login into all these different systems and execute a search on each one.

I Googled for "search engine frontend", "meta search engine", etc. but i was not able to find something obvious that solves our problem. At this point, i have to say that we are not interested in building one "central repository" to be searched, but instead we are in need of a frontend that will accept the query from the user, "package it" to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receive the respone (JSON or XML) and present it to the user

Any suggestions on how we could solve it?

Answer 1

Your strategy is right: If you are not interested in building a central index, you will need an application that accepts the query from the user, converts it to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receives the responses and presents them to the user. This is exactly what a meta search engine does. Even if you use a framework (e.g. Carrot2), much work will probably remain to write those query and result transformers, and you will probably experience slow results because the meta search can never be faster than the underlying search modules of the components you search through.