Exploiting Organizational Information in Enterprise Text Search

This work describes an approach to improving search results by using information sources that are additionally available in the context of enterprise search. After identifying special problems of search in an intranet context, several supplemental ranking scores are proposed. They aim at ranking those documents higher that stem from the searching user’s context of work. For this purpose, organizational distance measures are introduced that rely on different types of structural knolwedge about an organization. The corresponding ranking strategies are implemented and tested in a prototype system operating on the intranet and corporate data sources of a large organization. The prototype system shows significantly improved search results.