Re:Suggestion: Google It (Score 1)

You are describing the biggest challenge that corporations face when attempting to bring order to a general index. Products like the Google Appliance and Oracle Enterprise Search do a great job indexing all of your disparate content sources - unfortunately much of the context of the source is lost. What is required, and by far is the hardest part, is getting the corporation/government/whatever to agree on an enterprise taxonomy that is used as a base level of categorization for the data being indexed. If you can achieve agreement on a taxonomy, combining the information's metadata with its general index information provides a system that supports both targeted searches as well as general queries. Once again the issue is not technology. It is the ability of the organization to adopt new processes and accept change.