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.