Search is one of the most used and most underinvested features in enterprise software. When search works well, it accelerates every workflow that depends on finding information. When it works poorly — returning irrelevant results, failing to surface recent content, or missing obvious matches — it becomes a daily frustration that erodes productivity and trust in the platform.
The Modern Search Architecture
Modern enterprise search architectures typically combine a semantic search layer (embedding models that understand query intent) with a lexical search layer (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch for keyword matching) and a reranking layer (ML models that optimize result ordering for relevance). This hybrid approach delivers far better results than pure keyword search or pure semantic search alone.