Previously, when a person needed information within a company, all one needed to do was look within the filing cabinets to locate the information. Now, a person at a company needs to get on the local server connected within a company or instant message a co-worker or send out a blanket email to everyone to locate the content they need. But searching on a massive server takes a ton of time so with the advent of enterprise search, anything you need and maybe more than you expected is now retrievable.
 
Knowledge Management
Just like it says, companies who specialize in knowledge management give organizations and businesses more than enterprise search capabilities. Companies now have a way to manage it all including ways to reuse the valuable content and reap a profit to boot! Electronic documents are created at an alarming rate: excel charts, emails, video, whitepages and images all fall under this electronic data and content is expanding. It isn't necessarily created in a perfect order either. Informal emails make up a great portion of valuable content. Knowledge management and enterprise search organizations are becoming a norm for most companies who want to take control of their ever expanding digital content, take control of it in an orderly manner and make use of it all.
 
Internet
The advent of the Internet has brought about several changes no doubt, but perhaps one of the most telling changes has been in the publishing industry. Large publishing warehouses, like text books and encyclopedic publishers have changed the way they publish since the advent of online publishing. Bookstores, universities and just basic demand has changed the need for paper publishing. Students are given online resources to long onto, bound encyclopedias were ancient overnight and the bulky- all-in-one text book for an entire college series just isn't cost effective, up to date or realistic anymore in our digital age.
 
Enterprise Search
Instead, publishing organizations have teamed up with knowledge management and digital asset management resources to offer online publishing in an entirely new way. With digital asset management solutions, publishing industries can compete with online publishing. Publishers can not only reuse content by packaging it in new and profitable ways, but users are able to piece together personally built texts- piecing together just what they need using enterprise search within a publishing house's contentbase. Using enterprise search, a professor, for example is able to create his own personal textbook from a large encyclopedic publisher after entering in a specific keyword. Some enterprise search engines are so powerful and precise that if a person was to enter in the keyword "Masai Tribe," images, video and full text documents would be available to choose from and allow the user to build just what was needed, not needing to bother with the rest of the "M" section of the encyclopedia.
 
Enterprise search saves time, saves money and makes money. Publishers now can take all of their information say on the Masai Tribe scattered about in different sources and create one online text that can be accessed through a fee, a monthly membership or flat rate. If a publishing house can do all that with an enterprise search, what can it do for your company?