Collections of digital documents can nowadays be found everywhere in institutions, universities or companies. Examples are Web sites or intranets. But searching them for information can still be painful. Searches often return either large numbers of matches or no suitable matches at all.

Such document collections can vary a lot in size and how much structure they carry. What they have in common is that they typically do have some structure and that they cover a limited range of topics. The second point is significantly different from documents on the Web in general.

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Search has become ubiquitous but that does not mean that search has been solved. Enterprise search, which is broadly speaking the use of information retrieval technology to find information within organisations, is a good example to illustrate this. It is an area that is of huge importance for businesses, yet has attracted relatively little academic interest. Searching the Enterprise explores the main issues involved in enterprise search both from a research as well as a practical point of view. It first plots the landscape of enterprise search and its links to related areas, which allows it...