When we consider the word “search,” most of us will conjure up a mental image of a Google search box.

But Google isn’t the be-all and end-all for search. The newly launched startup SRCH2 doesn’t focus on standard web search, a space inhabited by Google and Bing. It’s offering a new take on “enterprise search.”

“We are trying to make enterprise search more Google-like,” said SRCH2 CEO Dev Bhatia [right] in a phone interview. “And make Google search available across all handsets and devices,” he explained.

Enterprise search specifically refers to the practice of making information, available from within multiple corporate data sources, searchable to an audience. Consider the typical search bar on Home Depot’s or Macy’s websites.

A group of ex-Googlers founded SRCH2. They have raised seed funding from a roster of high-profile investors, including Data Collective Zachary Bogue and Matt Ocko, Redpoint’s Brad Jones, Horizen Ventures, and TenOneTen Ventures, a new Southern California venture firm created by Gil Elbaz and David Waxman, the founders of Applied Semantics.

The problem is that enterprise search results are not nearly as relevant or instantaneous as a Google web search. This is particularly true when you’re performing a search on a mobile device. The problem has perpetuated, says Bhatia, because most search technology is an extension of Apache Lucene, an open-source project that was not developed to meet the needs of today’s consumers.

Bhatia considers search companies ElasticSearch and LucidWorks as the primary competition. But he clarifies that these search products are built on top of Lucene. SRCH2 is developed from the ground up.

Also potentially challenging for the startup’s growth is that some companies will task their developers to build an in-house solution for search. Bhatia said this is labor intensive, time-consuming, and in most cases “30 times slower” than SRCH2.

Customers can pay for an annual license (usually in the five-figure range) or a hosted platform model, which is how SRCH2 plans to make money. Bhatia said the technology is currently used by a handful of large beta testers — primarily in the e-commerce space — but the company can’t disclose them yet.

Top image via SRCH2

Elasticsearch, the open source project for developers to slice and dice their data, has pulled in $10 million.

Since launching in 2009, Amsterdam-based Elasticsearch has become one the most popular open source frameworks on the market — the company told me it has been downloaded 1.5 million times — it experienced 185,000 downloads in September and 200,000 in the month of October alone.

Shay Banon, cofounder and CTO, claims that the company is differentiated for it’s “general purpose big data” solution — it’s not just an enterprise search tool to index structured data. “People are using it to store huge amounts of logs and drive analytics,” he said.

Organizations are struggling to draw business insights from mountains of unstructured (texts, emails, and so on) and structured data. Elasticsearch and the growing crop of well-funded “big data” startups, will claim to provide the simplest way to crawl through petabytes of information, store a massive volume of data, and extract the most relevant information.

To avoid being delineated as search solution for companies of all sizes (the term “enterprise search” is somewhat outdated and is most often associated with legacy vendors like HP’s Autonomy and Oracle-owned Endeca) it is branding itself as a big data company.

To get ahead of the trend, the product was designed to be robust and easy to use; “it has an extremely simple API,” Banon explained on a phone interview with VentureBeat. “You don’t have to be a data scientist to use it — the analytics are useful to marketing, business and customer support teams.”

According to Banon, the major challenge has been to ensure that “business execution catches up with the adoption rate of the open source project.” In other words, it’s a firm favorite with devs, but it’s time for the founding team to double-down on a revenue model. To be closer to the action and to their investors, he revealed that they are actively looking to relocate to San Francisco.

What’s interesting is that this is the only legitimate competitor that has emerged to give Apache Lucene / Solr (the standalone open-source enterprise search project) a run for its money. Solr was invented in 2004 at CNET Networks, joined with Lucene, and is currently run by the Apache Software Foundation’s dev team.

Shay Banon, Elasticsearch’s CTO

Likewise, Elasticsearch’s business model takes a page from LucidWorks’s book. LucidWorks is the commercial arm of Apache Lucene / Solr, and makes its money by selling support services. Elasticsearch offers production support subscriptions and training courses to its customers.

Despite the competition, Benchmark Capital were impressed by the company’s sky-rocketing growth, and drew a comparison to previous open source investments, RedHat, MySQL and SpringSource. “Shay’s [Banon] magnetic energy in delivering a simple, and highly-usable solution for extracting meaning and information from big data sets the company apart from the current market hype and hyperbole,” said Peter Fenton, general partner, Benchmark Capital in a statement.

This funding round was led by Benchmark Capital with participation Rod Johnson, cofounder of SpringSource, and from big data focused venture fund, Data Collective.

Top Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Opzi, which provides a question-and-answer platform similar to Quora for enterprise customers, is betting that companies relying on email and services like Salesforce’s Chatter for quick answers have exhausted employees to the point of jumping on board the service. Opzi founder Euwyn Poon demoed the product at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today.

The platform serves as a way for employees to ask and answer questions, providing a company with a crowd-sourced FAQ for how to run the business or tackle technical problems any employee might run into. Users log in with a corporate email address and search for answers using keywords. Users can also email questions to be answered directly by other members of the Q&A service. Those answers will then also be distributed through email.

Poon said Opzi is essentially trying a different kind of enterprise search by giving people a search engine that helps them “solve a problem” rather than scour databases for anything along the lines of previously checked-in code or legal documents. Enterprise search is a bit of a different ball game from regular internet search, as most of the data is stored in emails and other tough-to-access places. By throwing all the information into a platform, Opzigives companies a quick reference guide and help employees sidestep the search process altogether.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-company has so far raised $1 million from a number of angel investors including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing, according to TechCrunch.