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8 top enterprise search engines
Whether an organization wants to improve its internal or external search strategies, an enterprise search engine can help users find information and protect data more easily.
Organizations create massive volumes of data, and users often struggle to find information they need. Whether it's branding materials, technical documents or emails, the average employee spends a good portion of their work week looking for information or tracking down someone who knows where it is.
Enterprise search engines emerged to simplify how organizations present information to users, whether they browse the company website as a prospect or search internal documents as an employee. The data they need could live inside a database, content management system (CMS) or an email server, and the search engine functions much like a consumer-facing engine, such as Google, to search for keywords or terms the user inputs. Modern enterprise search engines often use AI technology, like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), to provide a streamlined experience.
For enterprise content and data management leaders who want to improve their content management strategies, they should review the top eight enterprise search engines that can help.
These products were selected based on reports from leading analyst firms, such as Gartner and Forrester, and user reviews on G2 and Capterra, plus additional research by TechTarget editors.
1. AddSearch
With products for both e-commerce and internal enterprise search, AddSearch is a hosted service that enables organizations to set up a search site using an API. It primarily focuses on crawling websites for internal results, enabling website visitors to find what they need and filter out irrelevant results.
AddSearch's main features include autocomplete and search suggestions, the ability to exclude content from search results, analysis tools to determine search intent, a UI library to build customized search engines, and personalization capabilities, such as smart product recommendations. It integrates with most CMSes, including Shopify and WordPress. The latest versions added metafield indexing for Shopify -- which is a type of tagging system the vendor offers -- and videos for personalization. AddSearch also supports PDF searches and is mobile-compatible.
Pricing starts at $99 per month -- when billed annually -- for the Professional tier, which also supports PowerPoint searches and Google Analytics integrations.
2. Algolia
Algolia is an AI search platform that uses an API to connect with enterprise CMSes, such as BigCommerce, Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Its main features include semantic and keyword search to determine intent, query categorization to show the most relevant results, the ability to boost popular content and personalized search suggestions. Developers can also integrate Algolia into websites and mobile apps.
All its pricing plans include AI recommendations for products like trending items, frequently bought together suggestions and recommendations analytics. Algolia also offers UI components and JavaScript frameworks to build out the front end of the search engines.
Algolia offers a free plan that lets organizations test AI features and field up to 10,000 searches per month. Its Pay-as-You-Go plan is 50 cents per additional 1,000 searches.
Pricing for Premium and Elevate plans, which include professional services like guided onboarding, is available upon request.
3. AlphaSense
Unlike many other enterprise search engines, AlphaSense can integrate internal data with external sources, such as broker research, SEC filings, and news and trade journals to offer users more complete answers. It includes intelligent search to extract information from text-dense documents, workflows to improve collaboration and dashboards and alerts to track companies, industries and topics.
Other AlphaSense features include internal messaging and collaboration, API support, customizable alerts and enterprise-grade data protection and security compliance with protocols such as SOC2. Support includes 24/7 chat, a button for live help on the website and webinars.
Pricing is available upon request.
4. Coveo
Coveo is an AI-powered platform that lets organizations build external and internal-facing enterprise search engines. Coveo's customers can use the product for websites, e-commerce or service applications, and as an internal workplace tool to find and present information to employees.
Coveo's main features include generative answering from large language models, semantic search to determine user intent, AI recommendations for content and products, and personalization features. Workplace tools include the ability to create employee portals and intranets. Developers can also integrate Coveo with a variety of apps, including Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Azure, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Coveo offers a free trial for 14 days, and further pricing information is available upon request.
5. Elasticsearch
As part of the open source Elastic Stack, Elasticsearch lets developers build RESTful AI and ML enterprise search engines for customers and employees. It enables generative AI, enterprise search, e-commerce search, website search, workplace search and customer search use cases with exposed APIs, a native web crawler, ML and NLP capabilities and search analytics to better understand what users search for on a website or within the organization.
Elasticsearch can be hosted on AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure and offers UI capabilities to build customized search experiences.
Standard pricing starts at $95 per month, with web-based support and two support contacts included. Other support options include phone support and guaranteed response times.
6. Glean
Not to be confused with the study tool, Glean is an enterprise search engine that uses AI and ML to enable natural language searches. It connects various data sources, personalizes results to the user and aligns with organizational data privileges to ensure the right person receives the proper answer.
Glean offers recommendations, organizational charts and directories, the ability to create curated collections and data loss protection features to prevent data from being overexposed. Glean connects with over 100 apps, using native, push APIs and web-based connectors, including Figma, GitHub, Microsoft Teams and Jira.
Its support options include a knowledge hub, and pricing is available upon request.
7. Guru
Combining enterprise search, intranet and wiki features, Guru pulls together a variety of sources to improve how employees find information. Its main features include integration with existing data sources so users can find information through Slack, their browsers, Teams or another tool, AI capabilities like NLP to understand search intent, and workflow integrations with Slack and Zendesk.
In particular, Guru uses semantic search to offer better answers, regardless of the keywords, and uses previous search history to fine-tune results. It integrates with collaboration tools, documents including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, learning management systems and project management tools.
Guru provides a 30-day limited free trial. Pricing starts at $15 per user monthly.
8. Inbenta Search
Inbenta Search lets developers create search functionalities for customers and employees on websites and company intranets. It uses AI and NLP for semantic search and to understand user intent, rather than relying on specific keywords to retrieve information. Its other main features include customization through an SDK, support for 35 languages, behavioral analytics and self-learning to return more intelligent search results.
Some of the integrations Inbenta Search supports include OpenAI's GPT, legacy data sources and CRM tools like Salesforce and Zendesk. It comes with detailed search dashboards to group user queries so organizations can determine which topics to search for, as well as support for multiple formats through web crawlers and JSON uploads. Inbenta also offers a developers' portal to access information about APIs and SDKs.
Pricing is available upon request.
Christine Campbell is a freelance writer specializing in business and B2B technology.
