Self-Learning Intelligent Search, Explained
Intelligent search is no longer a nice-to-have feature in organizational information systems; it is a critical part of how businesses are transforming the way they work. Intelligent search goes beyond “findability” and information access. Like a trusted advisor, intelligent search knows what documents you need for your tasks and which articles your colleagues found most valuable and would be useful to you too, and simply gives everyone the information they need, when they need it. And the power and sophistication of machine-learning technology is the driving force behind intelligent search.
What Is Machine Learning?
Machine learning learns from and makes predictions on data. Applied to search, every time a user performs an action on your website or support portal, he or she provides data about what’s useful. Did they submit a support ticket? That means the articles they just read did not help. Do most people spend only one minute with a document that would normally take 10 minutes to read? That’s a sign that the content isn’t useful, or perhaps it’s too difficult to understand. With machine learning, all of that information and more can be used to make data-driven predictions and decisions without manual intervention.
How Will Machine Learning Make Search Intelligent?
When someone submits a search query or clicks on the third search result, they are implicitly telling you what is most relevant. As your online community members download content, visit various web pages, watch videos, start an online chat with your support agents or submit support tickets, their behavior provides information on the relevance of the content they come across. This behavioral data as well as search behavior—which signals intent—are captured by search usage analytics.
Intelligent self-learning search engines powered by machine learning can leverage such usage analytics data to continuously self-learn. This improves search relevance and hence, the self-service experience on your community in many ways. For example, automatic fine-tuning and ranking of search results based on machine-generated predictions about what’s most useful improves the experience of all community members.
Without machine learning and analytics data, administrators need to fine-tune search rankings manually: Create boosting rules, add synonyms, promote documents, etc. Because relevance is an ever-evolving process—the document that was the most relevant last week may no longer be relevant today—it is almost impossible for administrators, especially those at large organizations or those with multiple product lines, to keep pace with the rate of change.
With machine learning, highly manual and complex enterprise search can be transformed into intelligent, self-learning and self-tuning search.
Why Now?
Machine learning has been around for a long time. It used to be very complex to deploy and manage. Collecting usage data, managing databases, provisioning servers, developing and maintaining machine learning algorithms and using machine-learning predictions in the search system were typically very complex. This would require data scientists, database experts and developers. Only the biggest organizations could afford that. But the fast adoption of cloud solutions has made the use of machine learning much easier, cheaper and more attainable. In particular, the recent trend towards cloud-based enterprise search is a game changer.
What Is the Impact of Cloud-Based, Self-Learning Search?
With cloud-based, self-learning search, all the required components are hosted and managed by the vendor, such as Coveo. Because of its scalability, it has the potential to change the customer service industry the same way machine learning has impacted e-commerce and social networks. In the past, the high cost of using and managing machine-learning systems meant that machine learning was rarely used for traditional enterprise search or self-service support sites. The cloud makes that affordable to all customers and to all departments, especially when deploying self-learning search on self-service support sites and on communities, because of its ability to scale and handle large volumes of data.
If you’d like to find out more about how self-learning search is transforming businesses, visit www.coveo.com.
Coveo helps companies better engage customers and upskill employees with the best information, everywhere they work and interact. Coveo Intelligent Search responds relevantly to every question, proactively suggests related content and experts, and predicts what’s important to each person based on analytics and machine learning. Recognized as the Most Visionary Leader in Enterprise Search and as a Leader in Big Data Search and Knowledge Discovery, Coveo helps companies to succeed at self-service, create high performance contact centers, and cultivate company-wide collaboration. For more information, please visit www.coveo.com.