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