Here is an interesting alternative to the traditional search engine concept. XML content servers. Certainly in law enforcement, government, and intelligence services - these organizations struggle at times with the conversion and retrieval process from unstructured data, to structured within a relational database, to search and data mining, to reporting and distribution of the relevant.

MarkLogic offers a streamlined solution and comparative alternative to the "conventional method of search and retrieval".

Extracted from MarkLogic Brochure: Entitled: MarkLogic Server for Government

"...Defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies collect a tremendous volume of raw data. For these agencies, the fast, accurate analysis of this raw data to produce actionable intelligence is vital to their national security missions. With the increasing flow of textual content - emails, field reports, immigration records, open source content streams, Web content, and the like - government agencies are forced to reevaluate their analysis strategies. What may have worked before is no longer viable. Solutions based on open, industry-standard XML technologies are providing more powerful ways to integrate, discover, analyze, and share actionable intelligence.

MarkLogic Server^TM is the backbone of a powerful content integration, discovery, and analysis system that takes full advantage of XML content through the flexibility of XQuery. Designed and built to enterprise architecture standards, MarkLogic Server enables the seamless integration of COTS and custom analysis tools - such as entity extractors, classifiers, and language analyzers - to enrich content with new, vital information without incurring the time and cost typically associated with multi-vendor product integration. MarkLogic Server can easily handle multi-terabyte content sets.

Rapidly query and analyze large contentbases MarkLogic Server combines XML element query, XML proximity search, and full-text search to create a scaleable, fast, and complete content retrieval and analysis solution. Use XQuery to perform detailed, highly precise queries and content processing tasks that leverage all XML structural elements, with or without a formal DTD or XML schema. MarkLogic Server delivers millisecond response times against terabyte-scale contentbases. Load content "as is" without predefined DTDs or XML schemas Automatic conversion to XML makes "shredding" or "chunking" documents a thing of the past by eliminating the time-consuming and costly first step most organizations experience when attempting to format, load, and process content. MarkLogic Server loads XML content "as is" and converts popular document formats including Microsoft Office, HTML and Adobe PDF into structured XML - all without requiring adherence to predefined DTDs or schemas. In addition, MarkLogic Server is compatible with content archiving and interchange initiatives such as the Intelligence Community Metadata Working Group (ICMWG) and the Department of Defense Discovery Metadata Standard (DDMS), enabling full compliance with cross-agency standards for content integration and sharing. Create powerful, custom content processing pipelines Using the built-in Content Processing Framework, MarkLogic Server lets organizations define sequences of content processing steps and seamlessly incorporate functions such as document categorization, entity extraction, or linguistic analysis. MarkLogic Server can execute sequences of native XQuery statements plus call out to Web services-enabled external applications within the content processing flow. Support mission-critical, multi-terabyte contentbases Robust, enterprise-class capabilities allow government organizations to confidently deploy MarkLogic Server for their most mission-critical content assets. MarkLogic Server features high availability, error recovery, and cluster monitoring as well as a comprehensive administrator interface..."