science

Search as a service

Search as a service is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Search as a service rather than just read about it. In short: Search as a service is a branch of software as a service (SaaS), focused on enterprise search or site-specific web search. The need for search Searching is an important part of any business database function, either through internal databases, internal document stores, or through the content of a website.

Key takeaways

Search as a service belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Search as a service to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Search as a service from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Search as a service is a branch of software as a service (SaaS), focused on enterprise search or site-specific web search.

The need for search Searching is an important part of any business database function, either through internal databases, internal document stores, or through the content of a website. This is needed for both internal company staff and for external customers. Although a simple database query such as "List existing customers with a postal code for Argleton" is a trivial piece of in-house software development, probably through SQL, this is a simplistic example. More complex searches such as "Find all product brochure text that references the Bindeez product" or "Search the customer-uploaded reviews for any synonyms of 'caught fire' and 'pets' or 'children'" are more difficult to implement. Search, especially free text search or text searching through images of scanned documents, is a specialist discipline.

Externally-provided search services By outsourcing the search function to a specialist search company through software as a service, a more capable search function may be available to even the smallest organisation. Two methods are popular for this:

Web-mediated search One method searches a company's publicly visible web presence. An existing search engine such as Bing or Google is encouraged to web crawl this site, as they would normally do so anyway. A link to the company's favoured search partner is coded onto their web site as a simple HTML web form or search box. When a query is submitted, this search box searches the main Google (or other) corpus for the text string, but only for results from that particular web site. These results are then displayed on the site's page, as if they were returned by the site itself. This feature is very easily implemented: the search form simply includes a site: qualifier in the query string passed to the search engine.

Search as a service The second method is more sophisticated, although more complex. It can support enterprise search too, searching through private resources that are not visible to the public web. Only this form is commonly termed 'Search as a service'. A search provider company offers a search service and a contract is agreed with the client to support their searches. The client then uses the provider's API to upload content data or indexing metadata (if already available) for the content to be searched. The provider then constructs a search index for this content. If the content is free text data or similar unstructured data, then it is first tokenised by Lucene, or similar process.[i] Search as a service may also be particularly useful for mobile applications, where the client device is limited for storage, processing speed and connection bandwidth. This approach is taken by Algolia, a popular player in the field. Alternately, newer service providers like ExpertRec[4] have further simplified the approach by avoiding having to upload data via API and instead by having data extracted by a crawler and then tokenised by Lucene/Solr.

Federated search Search as a service should not be confused with federated search, such as Z39.50. These are also services where an agent queries one or more external search engines. In these cases, however, the search engine providers are closely coupled to the content databases. The remoting service passes only the query and the results, not the content metadata to populate the search indexes.

See also Google Blog Search Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as a service

Notes

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Search as a service

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Search as a service claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Search as a service before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Search as a service ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Search as a service

In research: Search as a service appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Search as a service in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Search as a service is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics As a service, Internet search engines, Semantic Web, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Search as a service outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Search as a service in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Search as a service means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Search as a service out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Search as a service in simple terms?

Search as a service is a branch of software as a service (SaaS), focused on enterprise search or site-specific web search. The need for search Searching is an important part of any business database function, either through internal databases, internal document stores, or through the content of a w…

Why does Search as a service matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Search as a service?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Search as a service.