Analysis of Enterprise Search Engine Market & Best Software in '24

Enterprise search engines can improve productivity and enable data-driven decision-making through  quick and easy access to enterprise data. In terms of size, the global enterprise search engine market size was ~$ 3.75 billion in 2021, and expected to grow by 11% from 2022 to 2028. ¹ 

These forecasts show that the market will continue to attract newcomers and increase competition among existing vendors. Such market dynamics might confuse business leaders and analysts, prolonging their decision-making process in choosing an enterprise search tool. 

This article provides an overview of the leading enterprise search engines to help you create a shortlist. The six vendors below are mentioned by all industry analysts and ranked top in our objective and comprehensive lists.

What is an enterprise search engine?

An enterprise search engine is software to search and retrieve information from various sources. It aims to deliver quick and accurate access to data and information for enterprise users by considering the needs of businesses and organizations. 

Enterprise search engines may include features such as:

• Natural language processing (NLP)
• Entity extraction
• Relevancy ranking
• Faceted search 

Explore how enterprise search works, its applications, and why it matters. 

Here is a list of enterprise search tool vendors in alphabetical order: 

Amazon CloudSearch

Amazon Web Services, based in Seattle, offers a search service solution on Amazon Cloud. 

Features: 

• Customizable relevance ranking and query-time rank expressions
• Support for 30+ languages
• Geospatial search
• Amazon and third-party connectors

Amazon offers a free trial of CloudSearch for up to 30 days.

Top Industries: Computer Software, Information Technology and Services

Coveo

Coveo Solutions, based in Quebec City since 2005, provides AI-powered search for enterprise-scale data.

Features:

• Smart Snippets capability for personalization & recommendation
• Analytic reports & dashboards
• Content filtering, text analysis, data encryption 
• Role-based access control
• Dara residency control 
• Flexible deployment 

Coveo offers a free trial of its search and insights platform.

Top Industries: Retail & Telecommunications

Elastic Search

Elastic has been based in California since 2010. The Elastic stack platform offers Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security products. The Elastic search engine is based on Lucene. 

Features: 

•  Dashboards for analytics 
• Machine learning, such as vector search, text classification, data annotation, PyTorch, and Hugging Face
• Web crawler
• ​​Easy integration to SaaS applications
• Deployment flexibility (e.g. on-prem, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud)
• Personalization 

ElasticSearch offers a 14-day free trial of their cloud-based Elastic Enterprise Search solution.

Top Industries: Information Technology and Services, Computer Software

Google Cloud Search 

Google, based in California, offers Google Cloud Search, a cloud-based search solution. Find how Google Cloud Search works in the Figure below. 

Features:

• Customizable search capabilities
• Integration to Google Workspace apps (e.g. Gmail & Drive) and Google APIs.
• Google and third-party connectors 
• Support 100+ data sources, including Salesforce and SAP

Top Industries: Computer Software

IBM Watson Discovery 

IBM, based in NY, offers a cloud-based search and analytics platform to uncover insights.

Features:

• Machine learning, such as Smart Document Understanding (SDU)
• Content mining & text mining using NLP & sentiment analysis
• Unstructured & structured large-scale data
• Text data optimization 
• Easy integration into other IBM products 
• Integration to chatbots
• Ability to create industry-specific dictionaries

IBM offers a free plan, enabling firms to upload 1000 documents, 200 news queries, and a custom model. 

Top Industries: Computer Software, Information Technology and Services

Microsoft 

Microsoft offers two products for enterprise search: Microsoft Search and Azure Cognitive Search. 

1. Microsoft Search is connected to the Microsoft Workplace and products, such as Microsoft 365.
2. Azure Cognitive Search is a cloud-based service for developers. 

Features:

• ML & NLP
• Ingestion, intent and relevancy intelligence
• Connection to multiple data sources
• Contextualization for search results (e.g., “tag boosting”)

Top industries: Government, manufacturing and retail.

Final thoughts

Based on our research, all these tools can connect, extract and understand data, evaluate and tune the relevance of their results and secure their operations. Gartner indicates that analytics, personalization, multi-language support and deployment flexibility are major differentiating capabilities among competitors. 

According to Forrester (See Figure 1), Elastic, Coveo, Microsoft & Google are the leaders in cognitive search, known as insight search, a specific enterprise search engine type. IBM & Amazon are demonstrated as strong performers.  Also, Gartner ranks IBM, Microsoft, Coveo and Elastic as market leaders (See Figure 2).   

Further reading

Discover more on enterprise engine by reading:

• Insight Engines: How it works, Why it matters & Use Cases
• Insight Engine vs. Enterprise Search: 7 Key Differences
• Top 10 Knowledge Management Tools: in-Depth Guide

Check out various insight engines through our data-driven and comprehensive list of tools.

If you have more questions, you can always let us know:

If you need more help, let us: Find the Right Vendors

External Links

• 1. “Enterprise Search Market to Reach Valuation of $7.84 billion by 2028.” Globe Newswire. 2022. Revisited March 31, 2023.
• 2. Gualtieri, Mike; Sridharan, Rividya; Perdoni, Robert (2021). “The Forrester Wave™: Cognitive Search, Q3 2021.” Forrester. Revisited March 31, 2023.
• 3. Emmott, Stephen; Mullen, Anthony; Pidsley,David; Nelms, Tim (2022). “Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines.” Gartner. Revisited March 31, 2023.