I *am* a search person, but I never, ever peddle it as a complete solution. I think simple full-text search across an enterprise can improve employee's work, and that said simple text should incorporate as much metadata as can be created within the scope of the organization. Everybody needs to know how to send a fedex package and what the holiday schedule is going to be. That information should be findable in a multitude of ways, from a generic portal to a personal login page to a departmental or task-based landing page, as well as search.

But there are some jobs that really do RESEARCH, and they need the expensive stuff: taxonomies, classifiers, entity extractors, natural-language processing, speech-to-text, video closed--captions, etc. Those jobs, whether in sales or biochemistry, should have specialized search tools to do their jobs properly.

And if it all works properly, there are links from the simple search to the special-subject search engines, and vice versa. And they both merge into the navigation because navigation categories can be dynamically generated for search results or just hierarchy drill down.