While enterprises are suffering headaches from managing and harvesting their own Big Data sets, they’ve probably forgotten there’s a whole ocean of it out there, in the form of free public data that’s accessible to one and all. What’s more, this publicly available data often provides just as many useful insights, if not more so, than some company’s own data. Few will argue that government data isn’t a valuable resource, but the question is, how do companies go about collecting it?

The answer might just lie with Enigma, an information discovery startup with incredibly lofty ambitions that recently pitched itself at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York. In a nutshell, Enigma wants to become the “Google” for the enterprise, making the sea of resources from government data available to anyone asks, but it also wants to go further than that – helping companies to digest that data as well.

Led by its CEO Jeremy Bronfmann, together with founders Marc Dacosta and Hicham Oudghiri, Enigma boasts that it has access to more than 100,000 different sources of publicly available data, scraping this from federal and state records, labor filings, SEC filings, lists of frozen assets and more.

Of course, most of this data is accessible already, all you need to do is go look for it on search engines like Bing or Google, but the problem is that doing so can be tricky to say the least. Search engines are useful, but they also generate an awful lot of clutter, which means that conducting thorough research can be time consuming to say the least.

To solve this problem, Enigma’s creators have developed a specialized search and discovery tool that allows its clients to weed out all of the crap, specifically pulling up records like FCC filings, SEC filings, visa employment data, real estate records and so on.

In an example of how Enigma works at TechCrunch Disrupt, Bronfmann conducted a simple search for the term “Google”. Rather than throw up links to the search engine, Gmail and Google+, Enigma instead presented a list of relevant records, such as security filings made by the company, property records relevant to Google, visa applications to the Department of Labor and so on. Delving into these records, it’s possible to come up with lots of useful info, for example the fact that Google only spends $46,000 a year outsourcing design work to overseas designers.

To assist its clients, which include the Harvard Business School, the New York Times and SAP Capital IQ, Enigma has also released an API that allows them to incorporate their own data into its search tool.

“The ability to use all different data sources in different ways, and the way illustrated by their model is a good one because you can use the API as a data source,” concluded a TechCrunch correspondent at the end of the presentation.

For enterprises that adopt Enigma, this tool will no doubt take some time to get used to, but few would deny that they’re offering is a very interesting proposition. Enigma’s dataset is a constantly evolving one, and its not limited to a specific industry or type of data, which should make it extremely useful for a wide range of customers. Moreover, the ability to discover this kind of data without wasting hours searching the web is hugely advantageous. Better still is its ability to connect vastly different sets of data together. It might be early days for Enigma, but there’s every sign that this could prove to be one incredibly useful tool.