SAP Announces Enterprise Search

Where SAP has the edge with building its own search engine—and where Enterprise Search takes advantage of this fact—is that it is able to consider the enterprise schema and data model as well as the role, preferences and intentions of the person conducting the search to provide context. (Presumably other business applications vendors would have the same leg up with their own search engines tapping data stored in their systems.)

While SAP's (or Oracle's, or IBM's, or Microsoft's) strength is in understanding the data model, I wonder if Google's mastery of the "search fabric" (as they call it) might trump any specific insight into the guts of a given data model or information architecture, especially as knowledge from other applications gets woven into the results.