Companies and employees nowadays have access to a vast array of heterogeneous data in the form of company emails, CRM, CMS and ERP systems, and plenty more. Often this data is either siloed in a single location or spread across so many different platforms that finding relevant data when needed can be difficult. This is the problem that Intelligent Search intends to solve.
What is Intelligent Search?
Intelligent search, also known as enterprise search, helps large organisations to find company data spread across many disparate systems. They work differently to traditional search engines used to search the web, though the goal is similar: to connect users with the information they are trying to find.
The difference between a traditional search engine and intelligent search lies in how they work and what their purpose is. Search engines feature extremely broad data sets and typically search for one type of data at a time, such as either searching for text, images, or map locations. Intelligent search instead combines multiple heterogeneous data sets from within one particular organisation and makes that information easily searchable and accessible for employees. This helps them to find information faster and reduces the time and effort spent attempting to find information that may otherwise be locked in a particular application or data set.
How is Intelligent Search Useful for Organisations?
As organisations typically depend on a variety of different systems for various business operations, it makes finding and retrieving data from many different sources quickly and efficiently difficult. Finding important data becomes a problem when that important data may be spread across a variety of both structured and unstructured data formats and siloed systems, as well as potentially stored in several different languages.
This makes it difficult for employees to quickly and easily find information that they are looking for using traditional search tools. Either data is not in an easily searchable format, employees don’t know the correct keywords to find what they’re looking for, or the information may be in a language they don’t know. Intelligent search leverages a combination of technological advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve these issues and provide a search solution for employees that works as smoothly as a traditional search engine. This helps reduce time spent searching and helps increase employee productivity.
How Does Intelligent Search Work?
Installing an intelligent search solution is a three-stage process. First, an enterprise search engine is used to gather data from across many different sources and formats, including both internal and external data sources. This information is then indexed, which involves analysing data to understand relationships and make links between different data sets. This enriches the data and makes finding related information easier.
After data has been gathered and indexed, it can then be searched for by employees. This search takes advantage of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning in order to allow employees to search for data using natural, human-like expressions in their native language. NLP is then used to understand the search terms within a given context to retrieve the most relevant results. This context can involve information such as employee search history in order to deliver relevant results for ambiguous search terms.
Benefits of Intelligent Search
Searching across vast, unstructured and unrelated data sets in order to extract the most relevant information in an efficient and timely manner is difficult. Many organisations lack the budget or expertise to develop in-house search systems, which means that much organisation data ends up remaining segregated and difficult to find.
Intelligent enterprise search solutions not only help to link all of these disparate data sources together and make them searchable, but they do so in a way that is both secure and in compliance with data handling policies. This is important, as data security must not be compromised, which includes respecting data access levels and security policies when retrieving results.
Intelligent search solutions are also capable of delivering results for search queries quickly and efficiently from many different sources, languages, and formats. This speed can drastically improve employee productivity, as a significant portion of employee time may otherwise be spent simply trying to find data that is necessary for them to perform their job. Without intelligent search solutions, finding this data can be difficult and may take exponentially longer to find than with an intelligent search solution.
The Future of Intelligent Search
Intelligent search solutions work on the cutting edge of data science and machine learning in order to make enterprise search even simpler and easier to use. In the future, predictive search and self-learning algorithms aim to make finding information even faster. By learning search and usage patterns, predictive AI makes better use of context to customise search results based on each individual user. This can help deliver the most relevant results with no extra effort on behalf of the user.
Intelligent enterprise search solutions aim to make it ever easier for organisations to gather and retrieve data spread across numerous unrelated systems and leverage AI and machine learning to make data discovery and retrieval as fast, efficient and easy as possible.
Sinequa serves both large and complex organizations with the most complete enterprise search, ever. Customers employ our intelligent search platform to connect all content (both text and data), derive meaning, learn from user interactions, and present information in context. This solves content chaos and informs employees through a single, secure interface. They get the knowledge, expertise, and insights needed to make informed decisions and do more, faster. These organizations accelerate innovation, reduce rework, foster collaboration, ensure compliance, and increase productivity. Become Information-Driven™ with Sinequa.
