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Enterprise search turns your modern intranet or employee experience platform into a trusted starting point, delivering answer‑first, permission‑aware results across the tools your teams use. This post explains what enterprise search is, why it matters, and how to ensure yours enhances the employee experience.
Done right, enterprise search delivers fast, permission‑aware answers across your modern intranet or employee experience platform and other workplace tools, so people can stop hunting and start doing.
Strong search capabilities elevate your employee knowledge base, reduce HR and IT tickets, and help your digital employee experience platform become a go-to destination that moves work forward.
In this post, we’ll cover what enterprise search is, why it’s so crucial to employee experience strategy, and what search features are most important for modern workplaces.
What is enterprise search?
Enterprise search is a tool that brings all your company knowledge into one, permission‑aware search experience across the intranet and connected repositories.
In practical terms, that means employees can ask a question and see results from intranet pages, people profiles, and policies alongside items from SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, ServiceNow, and more, all in one place. Increasingly, AI Search complements traditional enterprise search with a short, natural‑language answer at the top and a clear citation to the official source.
Why is enterprise search important?
Employees expect consumer‑grade search at work, and high-quality enterprise search delivers on that expectation. In their personal lives, employees have access to increasingly effective search technology. Today’s search engines are good at what they do – surfacing the content that users need to find information and accomplish tasks. And AI has made searching the web even easier.
Unfortunately, many organizations lack search tools that can keep up with these high standards – especially ones that can cover their entire stack of business software and document management systems. This type of experience leaves employees frustrated and can discourage use of internal systems – leading to an increased burden on HR or IT. This is especially frustrating when the information could have been found via self-service.
The emergence of AI over the past several years has set search standards even higher. According to research from McKinsey, around 50% of Google search queries currently yield AI summaries, and that number is expected to rise to 75% by 2028. Today’s employees expect answer‑first search that understands full questions (like “How do I request PTO?”), not just keywords. When your intranet search delivers that experience, you see fewer HR and IT tickets, faster time‑to‑answer, and stronger adoption of the modern intranet as the place people start.
What does a good enterprise search solution or intranet search engine look like?
A best‑in‑class enterprise search experience integrates with the apps your workforce already uses, respects permissions, and returns answer‑first results with smart relevance – so employees find what they need in seconds.
Here are the key features to look for:
- Comprehensive integrations
- Effortless experiences led by AI
- Permission-aware search
- Deep indexing
- Administrative control
- Personalized results
- Analytics that help with decision-making
- Mobile optimization
Here’s a closer look at each essential feature of enterprise search.
Comprehensive, workplace-wide integrations
Modern workplace search should seamlessly connect to your core repositories and collaboration tools – think SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Google Drive, ServiceNow, Confluence, and more – inside a single search experience. The goal is to remove app‑hopping and uncover the right information, right away. The right integrations make knowledge from across your organization findable in a single place.
AI-enabled experiences
As we covered above, employees are used to and expecting AI search experiences, meaning AI features are no longer optional in enterprise search. To make search seamless, look for enterprise search software with intelligent semantic analysis, predictive suggestions, and precise filtering that guide people to the best answer quickly. Ideally, they’ll start typing and see high‑relevance suggestions appear instantly. Upon searching, a concise AI‑generated summary should sit at the top of results with a citation to the official source, followed by classic listings for deeper reading.
Permission‑aware search
Data integrity is non‑negotiable for modern workplaces. Enterprise search tools must adhere to source permissions – only showing documents and information a user has access to – and reflect real‑time changes in content and access. That keeps the employee knowledge base trustworthy and avoids the “I can see it but can’t open it” dead ends that frustrate employees and break confidence.
Deep indexing
Your search should look beyond document titles. It should ‘view’ inside articles, attachments, media, and more, and present it within the search results. Deep indexing reduces scan time and helps employees move from search to action faster.
Administrative control
Great search lets you tailor what’s included in results and promote authoritative content for recurring queries (like benefits, PTO, or security). You should be able to set the narrative by controlling how results are ranked and keeping “official” answers front and center. For example, Interact’s enterprise search allows you to set “best bets,” which allows intranet administrators to override the normal weighting in intelligent search and bring specific pages to the top of listings.
Personalized results
Search shouldn’t be one‑size‑fits‑all. By understanding your organization (teams, roles, locations, permissions), results can be personalized to each employee – pulling the most relevant answers for a warehouse supervisor in Madrid, a customer service rep in Chicago, or a developer in London. That personalization should also extend to people search (rich profile analysis to quickly find colleagues with the right expertise).
Advanced analytics
You can’t fix what you don’t see. Look for a platform with powerful search analytics that surface popular queries, zero‑result terms, and “failure to find” searches (e.g., when employees search for terms but answers are missing). With the right analytics, insights turn into measurable improvements in your digital workplace and lift the burden on IT and HR (employees who can’t find answers on their own will resort to the next best option – a ticket or an email).
Here’s an example of analytics in action: An organization can use search analytics to see that 100 employees searched for “password reset” within the past month and found nothing. With this information, the internal comms team can identify and fill a content gap with a simple how-to page – fixing an issue that was frustrating to employees and caused increased support tickets for IT.
Mobile optimization
Search experiences should be personalized, but search quality should be identical – whether an employee is at a desk, on the go, or on the front line. Mobile parity is especially important. If your modern intranet can surface concise answers and deep links on mobile, self‑service becomes a reality for frontline workers who need access to key information (SOPs, safety steps, shift policies).
What are some ways to ensure good enterprise search performance over time?
Treat search like a living service, not a one‑off setup. The organizations that see lasting value from enterprise search keep the employee knowledge base healthy, act on search data, practice clear and consistent governance, remind employees of the power of search, and prioritize mobile. These habits compound, improving findability, reducing HR and IT tickets, and ensuring your intranet or employee experience platform is a trusted destination that empowers employees.
Create a strong knowledge base
Start with content that’s structured for discovery by following knowledge management best practices, including:
- Lead content with answer‑first summaries and consolidate duplicates so there’s one authoritative page per topic.
- Apply consistent taxonomies and metadata (topic, audience, keywords, synonyms) so that natural‑language queries map cleanly to the right content.
- Assign page owners and create workflows (approval, review, archive) to keep knowledge accurate and current.
- Encourage contributions through forums/blogs, recognize helpful updates, and publish short “how to use the knowledge base” guidance for new authors.
These best practices increase findability and keep your employee knowledge base trustworthy.
Act on Analytics
Be sure you’re reviewing your intranet analytics at regular intervals, paying special attention to:
- Search summaries or overviews
- Popular searches
- Zero‑result or failure‑to‑find queries
- Pages without keywords
Once you identify areas to improve, you can work to fix them (add missing pages, improve titles and summaries, add keywords and synonyms, or boost the official answer for recurring terms). Pair this with content health signals (e.g., expired or unread pages) to reduce noise and improve relevance. Track a few practical KPIs and use the trends to prioritize monthly fixes. This turns analytics into action and makes search more reliable.
Set up and adhere to good governance practices
Successful enterprise search depends on the content behind it – and especially on how up-to-date that content is. A strong governance model keeps your intranet populated with information employees can trust, and gets them the right results faster. This means developing a solid framework defining roles, rules, and review cadences for high-value topics. Learn more about intranet governance best practices here.
Remind employees of the power of enterprise search
If you’ve improved your enterprise search capabilities recently, let employees know in your internal comms. They may not be searching due to subpar past experiences or low expectations – for example, they may have no idea an intranet search can surface content from other workplace apps as well. A few nudges are all it takes to get them searching up a storm.
Prioritize mobile
Ensure answer‑quality is identical on phones and desktops. Keep summaries concise, links easy to tap, and deep links opening in the right app with SSO. Test common frontline queries regularly; if extra steps creep in, cut them down. Mobile parity turns search into a reliable tool for everyone, everywhere, so it’s important to keep it working well.
Frequently asked questions about enterprise search, intranet search, and workplace search
Enterprise search unifies answers across your modern intranet or employee experience platform and connected systems in one permission‑aware experience. It aggregates content from pages, people, policies, and external repositories (e.g., SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, ServiceNow, Confluence) so employees can ask plain‑language questions and get trusted results.
Intranet search looks inside your intranet; enterprise (workplace) search spans the intranet or employee experience platform and other workplace tools.
When evaluating employee experience platforms and their enterprise search solutions, look for AI answer‑first results, permission awareness, deep indexing, admin controls, personalization, analytics, integrations with other workplace tools, and mobile parity. If your enterprise or intranet search engine lacks any of these, employees will lose trust in your digital workplace, adoption and usage will suffer, and HR and IT tickets will rise.
A few red flags for enterprise or intranet search include: results that ignore permissions, inability to pull search results in from other workplace apps, keyword‑only lists with no AI answer, a poor mobile experience, and a lack of control for administrators.
The best AI-enabled search for the workplace provides an answer‑first summary at the top (with clickable citations) and understands natural‑language queries. Traditional search listings still matter for browsing, but AI accelerates time‑to‑answer and enables more effective self-service, reducing HR and IT escalations.
Good enterprise search solutions will always consider your organization’s permissions to keep your workplace secure. Permission‑aware results only show what a user can access and open items in the source app. This maintains security, preserves trust in the employee knowledge base, and prevents dead‑ends for employees (think, “I can see it but can’t open it.”)
Deep indexing searches inside documents (articles, attachments, media), not just titles. It surfaces the right paragraph or file section so employees move from search to action faster.
Yes. Enterprise search results should adapt to roles, locations, teams, and permissions. Personalization improves relevance for every audience, from frontline staff to office workers at your corporate HQ, and elevates everyday use of your intranet or employee experience platform.
