Search engines have changed the way librarians and information professionals do their jobs. Search engines, rather than traditional online services, are often the starting point of choice for librarians. Accelerating this effect is new search technology developments over the last couple of years that significantly improve information access and discovery as compared to conventional search engines. Key basic attributes of such new search systems is flexibility to handle data from multiple data sources (both structured and unstructured data types), ability to handle secure content across a multitude of applications, robust high-availability architectures, and ability to scale to large data volumes and to handle a large number of simultaneous users with low latencies. Given these basic attributes, the ability to accurately answer user queries via intuitive user interfaces is becoming a prerequisite. Furthermore, for more advanced users, the search systems also have to provide advanced text-based data mining and information discovery technologies that dynamically adapt to the context and user at hand.