The council's acting CIO, John Bruggy, said enterprise search is becoming increasingly important because of the larger volumes of data and information being generated, and search tools are "critical" to scanning that data.
"Enterprise search inside the firewall is something we've looked at and considered, including being able to search across multiple systems," Bruggy said, adding a lot of enterprise systems have individual search features.
The council developed an in-house, .Net-based portal which is now under review. Integrating enterprise search functionality is now a consideration for the second-stage of the portal's development.
"Searching corporate and unstructured information is handy for corporate intranet portals," Bruggy said.
For it's Web site, the council selected ISYS:web 7 from Sydney-based search software vendor ISYS after calling for tenders.
Bruggy said because ISYS's search software is .Net-based it could be "seamlessly" integrated into the council's existing Web environment.
"When we first launched the Web site 'way back when', pages were always static and we had a very raw search tool written in CGI [Common Gateway Interface] and it was limited in functionality," he said.
At that time, Google's search appliances were not available and there "wasn't a lot on offer", but the market has "has taken off since".
"ISYS's came to the front because of its exposure and presence in the government and legal sectors," Bruggy said.