Dahu specialise in enterprise search.
We are a niche consultancy practice delivering powerful search applications that always put the end user first.
If you're not getting the results you want from your enterprise search, our consultants can help.
No matter where you are on the journey to delivering effective search solutions, our consultants can help. We are fiercely vendor independent, so we always give unbiased advice in choosing the right tools and partners for your needs.
From a business perspective, we can help you get started in establishing a business case for a search replacement or refreshment project, showing where the real ROI lies. When your digital assets are findable, re-usable and actionable, your colleagues are more productive and can focus on the real tasks they need to deliver in their roles.
In our Enterprise Search Workshops, our consultants outline the roadmap of an enterprise search project. If you have an under-performing search engine, consider a Relevance Workshop - a quick review and short programme to optimise an existing application is better than a large "lift-and-shift" project to replace the search engine only to find the same issues remain.
We help our clients with all aspects of a search project, from business analysis and data modelling, through vendor selection to project implementation including solution design, platform deployment, customisation, optimisation, testing and rollout.
We can support your entire search infrastructure, either as a managed service, or working in combination with your existing technology partners as subject-matter experts providing third or fourth-level support.
We also maintain Dahu Surface, the industry-leading no-code engine-agnostic enterprise search interface designed with the best in UX and design thinking at it's heart, providing an unrivalled task-driven end user experience.
Web search seems to work well most of the time so why is it so different in the enterprise? Why can't we just have Google?
Well, for a start, you don't get a Google-like experience out of the box. Users may demand Google-like capabilities but we also expect deep industry and company-specific understanding as well.
Think of all of the different ways you might receive or process information in your working day - email, voicemail, document management systems, file stores and shares, databases, warehouses and lakes, cloud services (eg Google Docs, Office365, Salesforce), web services (eg Twitter, Facebook), chat (eg Slack, Yammer) - the list goes on. Now think of all of the different document formats and file types you encounter. All the different security systems and passwords you encounter. Which regulatory and other compliance frameworks are in play. And remember - you don't have an SEO team who's job is to make all your diverse information sources and document types match your search engine's algorithms
Consider what your search engine needs to take into account when it handles a query coming from a new hire into your IT department and one from the head of HR. Relevance is always subjective and contextual. And unlike Google, your typical Enterprise Search doesn't have the benefit of learning from millions of end-users running billions of queries every day.
If you go down the Open-Source route, the core engine may be free from license costs but it is far from free to implement, to customise, or to integrate.
That is why Enterprise Search remains a hard problem and why you should consider working with a partner who specialises in Search.
We have worked with organsations all over the world, big and small, public, private and non-profit. Our customers include government departments, "big-four" global services companies, world-class manufacturers, broadcast and media companies, universities and hi-tech startups. We provide services to help customers define their strategy for enterprise search; with project design and implementation; as well as platform support, service optimisation and continuous improvement.
We are also the developers of Dahu Surface, the first engine-agnostic, user-led, task-oriented Enterprise Search interface.
Even if you are already taking advantage of the latest advances in deep learning and AI-led search, NLP and entity extraction, you can still help your end-users complete their information retrieval tasks more efficiently by surfacing your data in the only engine-agnostic, algorithm-independent user-focussed enterprise search interface available today.
Your back-end can be as intelligent as you choose - we provide the missing piece that integrates back-end AI with the human intelligence and learned domain-specific knowledge of your users.
Dahu Surface is specifically designed to be a configuration-only, no-code Enterprise Search interface. It's back-end server seamlessly integrates with a range of search engines from leading search vendors or the open source community and can be deployed internally or in the cloud. Its fully extensible and we are always adding support for new search platforms, including:
Apache Solr is an open-source search server has been around for almost a decade and a half, making it a mature product with a huge user community. With full-text search, faceting, near real-time indexing & high availability and massive scaleability, Solr is a fine choice for an Enterprise Search engine.
With a powerful query language, support for high availability, geo-search and horizontal scaling, Elastic Search in both its commercial and community versions can support the most demanding Enterprise Search requirements.
Unlike traditional keyword search, Yext leverages multiple advanced NLP algorithms to deliver a modern, exceptional search experience. It can provide answers to complex user questions against unstructured long-form documents.
Algolia is a powerful enterprise search engine hosted in the cloud. Its easy to setup, requires minimum on-going resources to manage and provides all the features you'd expect of an Enterprise Search engine.
If you've already invested in Azure Cognitive search, don't worry. Dahu Surface will shortly be able to provide its Enterperise Search facilities directly over Azure Cognitive Search.
Sharepoint has its own powerful search built in, but its really not designed to offer the Enterprise Search facilities that clients often need. Coming soon, Dahu Surface will support SharePoint search directly, offering best-of-breed user experience on your existing SharePoint investment.
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Call or email us to find out how we can help. +44 (0) 1672 563 110