Search-Based Applications

Search is often contrasted with database retrieval. Search engines are familiar to a wide variety of users, allowing quick access to large amounts of publicly available information over the web. Business applications are often built over databases which safeguard company data and securely perform transactions over this data. The two domains of search and database technology have long been separate, concerned with different problems, and providing different solutions to storing and retrieving information. Recently, search-based applications have begun to exploit the advantages of each technology, providing the intuitive usability of search engines, while dealing with protected enterprise data, scaling up to web-size problems. In this book, we present the differences between search and database technology, and show how these areas have been moving closer together. We present search based applications which merge functions of both, permitting database-like information search, presentation and reporting and elaborate mashups of multiple databases, and/or databases and unstructured content, based on search technology. Real case studies are given that illustrate the exploitation of search engine connectors to replace database search with faceted search over large-scale, real-time operational data, along with a mashup of social media, web mining, and database content. These case studies give a few examples of the tremendous variety of new search-based applications.