Search Engines for Business

Updated: July 31, 2023

Search engines for business are specialized tools designed to help companies efficiently find and access internal information, documents, and data. These search engines are tailored for the unique needs of organizations, providing secure and intelligent search capabilities across various data sources, such as intranets, file servers, databases, and cloud storage. Business search engines often include features like natural language processing, advanced filtering, and relevance ranking to deliver accurate and relevant search results quickly. By streamlining information retrieval, these search engines improve employee productivity, reduce time spent searching for data, and enable better decision-making. Moreover, they enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing within organizations, allowing employees to find and leverage relevant information across departments and projects, fostering a more connected and efficient work environment.

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2022. Meilisearch lands $15M investment to grow its ‘search-as-a-service’ business



Meilisearch, the company responsible for the development of the open-source search engine project with the same name, has successfully raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. Meilisearch sets itself apart from freely available search engine frameworks like Elasticsearch by catering to frontend applications across various domains, going beyond specific use cases such as e-commerce discovery. With the utilization of natural language processing, Meilisearch strives to enhance its understanding of user queries within any application, service, or website where it is implemented by developers. Meilisearch supports multiple major languages and provides search filters such as price and date, along with customizable ranking rules. Additionally, it effectively handles typographical errors and mistakes to ensure a seamless search experience without compromising accuracy.


2022. AlphaSense, an analysis and business intel search engine, finds $225M



AlphaSense, a company specializing in search tools for market analysis and business intelligence, has recently secured $225 million in funding. AlphaSense's primary focus lies in efficiently querying and organizing unstructured information. Unlike popular web search engines that continually improve through machine learning algorithms and the vast amount of user searches, AlphaSense faces the challenge of comprehending language and retrieving accurate information without the advantage of billions of web searches. In addition to its core search functionality, AlphaSense's second layer of product offerings revolves around presenting information in a manner that aligns with the specific needs and purposes of its users.


2019. AlphaSense, a search engine for business, raised $50M


AlphaSense, a platform that enables companies to swiftly gather market intelligence on specific trends and industries to facilitate informed business decisions, has successfully concluded a $50 million Series B funding round. The company intends to utilize this investment to further enhance its product and expand into additional verticals. An intriguing aspect of AlphaSense is its dual focus on aggregating user requests and proactively delivering information based on previous search parameters. Currently, the platform provides information only, but there is a clear potential to develop services that leverage this information to perform actions such as adjusting asking prices for sales and other transactions. With approximately 1,000 clients, AlphaSense primarily serves investment banks and related financial services companies.


2014. Google rebranded its business products


Usually, Google doesn't frequently change the names of its products like Microsoft does. However, this time they have made the decision to rename their group of business services from Google Enterprise to Google for Work. From now on, Google Apps is referred to as Google Apps for Work, the enterprise search engine is known as Google Search for Work, and so on. The reason behind this decision was explained by Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, in a blog post. He justified the rebranding by highlighting the changing nature of work. Previously, people used to work exclusively within enterprise cubicles, relying on computers with business programs installed. However, with the advent of cloud applications, people now have the flexibility to work from anywhere. Furthermore, Google now positions and sells its services not just as tools for enterprises, but as tools for individuals that assist them in their preferred work activities.


2012. Amazon made an atempt to beat Google in the Enterprise Search


Enterprise search engines (which are used mostly by large companies with large data stores) - have always been the prerogative of the large software vendors: SAP, Oracle, IBM, Open Text. Then, of course, the search giant Google came to party and became market leader. But now Google and company will face a new competitor. Amazon is launching a new service on its cloud platform - CloudSearch. At first glance, it seems that Google has nothing to fear. Even though Amazon developers have some experience in search technologies (they somehow developed a search engine for the online store and even launched the own search engine A9). But how can they compete with Google? The problem is that existing enterprise search engines, including Google Enterprise Search, are designed for work in local networks, on local servers. And as corporate data moves to the cloud, they become useless. ***