Order of magnitude reductions in the size of enterprise search result sets through the use of subject indexes

Keyword search has failed to adequately meet the needs of enterprise users. This is largely due to the indeterminate nature of languages. We argue a different approach needs to be taken, and draw on the success of previous library indexing concepts to propose a solution. We test our solution by performing search queries on a large research database. By incorporating readily available subject indexes into the search process, we obtain order of magnitude improvements in the performance of search queries. Our performance measure is the ratio of the number of documents returned without using subject indexes to the number of documents returned when subject indexes are used. We explain why the observed tenfold improvement in search performance on our research database can be expected to occur for searches on a wide variety of enterprise document stores.