You plan to do business in Minnesota. You need to search the state’s records for soil pollution rules. Good luck. Type the words "soil pollution regulations" into the search box on the state’s North Star portal, and you’ll find more than 70,000 results, including a seemingly endless stream of outdated government studies, arcane court cases and links to several agency databases.

But wait, a column on the browser’s left side promises hope. There, you see a list of "related topics," including a "natural resources>pollution>soil pollution" heading. You click on it and—Eureka!—only 97 results, including connections to specific, relevant agency fact sheets.

Welcome to the new world of search technology, where results are measured not only in terms of information depth, but also by real-world relevance. "We now have the power to build a topic structure, including topics, subtopics and browsable subcategories," says Eileen Quam, information architect for the Minnesota Office of Technology in St. Paul. "People can walk their way through our information."

For enterprises with rapidly expanding websites and portals, the need to make unstructured information—that is, data that hasn’t been formatted, tagged or indexed for fast retrieval—more manageable is undeniable. "It’s a well-known statistic in the search business that 80 percent of corporate data is unstructured versus 20 percent that’s contained in databases and ERP systems," says Tammy Alairys, a partner with business and technology consultancy Accenture. Alairys leads Accenture’s information management practice, which provides consulting services on enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI), and search and collaboration technologies.

It’s the promise of getting that 80 percent of data into the hands of people who can put it to good use that’s driving a growing interest in search technology. "There’s an awful lot of information sitting out there that is very difficult to extract value from," says Alairys. For CIOs, search technology provides a fast and efficient way (and sometimes the only way) to locate and retrieve vital intelligence. Yet, as more enterprises turn to search tools, CIOs are discovering that the technology also comes with strings attached, particularly in the areas of usability and security.

With search engines becoming increasingly powerful and useful, search engine companies are discovering the truth behind the old axiom, "Knowledge is power, and power is money." That’s why the search engine business is suddenly red hot. Google is making serious enterprise moves. And an array of tech vendors—including giants such as IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo, along with smaller players such as Endeca Technologies, Verity, Vivisimo and X1 Technologies—are all hoping to snag at least a snippet of Google’s success with their own search products. Heightened competition has also encouraged the companies to give away software, such as desktop search tools, in an effort to bring in more customers.