Search Technology: Greater power, but increasingly simple to use

Enriching search for better results

A leading pharmaceutical company had been using Microsoft’s FAST and SharePoint’s search engine to access internal content, but found that the out-of-box search capabilities of these products did not meet its requirements. In order to improve its users’ search experience, the organization looked for a way to gain greater functionality in the user interface, and also the ability to connect with additional content beyond the SharePoint repository.

In addition, the Microsoft search capability was not able to support the complex rules necessary for “best bets” that were likely to be the answers their users needed. “Of two million searches, about half were predictable queries,” noted the associate director of enterprise search, “so being able to steer the users toward the right answers was important.”

The information being accessed was the day-to-day content that employees needed in order to do their jobs, including HR support, technical support, and internal and external news. The pharma company decided to use a set of connectors and a user interface from BA Insight to enrich the native search capability of the Microsoft products. BA Insight’s software allowed searching all the repositories and provided recommendations that improved search efficiency. After using a collection of BA Insight products over the years, the company is now in the process of transitioning to SmartHub, which combines the functionality of products the organization had been using, and adds new AI-based capabilities.

Addressing user requirements

The clinical R&D content used by researchers at the company is stored in a different repository, but the search engine routes users there when the search terms indicate they are looking for scientific content (which they can also access directly through a different interface). The two repositories were separated because the 40-50 million documents relevant to scientific research were meaningful to a minority of employees and placed a burden on the more general content, which consisted of only about 100,000 documents.

The BA Insight software portfolio, which supports five different search engines, consists of multiple modules that can be combined into a platform to address specific needs. “Customers have the flexibility to select each module, and that combination becomes their platform, which is built on top of their existing search solution,” said Sean Coleman, CTO and chief customer officer at BA Insight. “In addition to being used as a search platform, BA Insight’s technology enables other functions, such as tech support and sales.”

BA Insight has solutions for Azure Search, Elastic Search, Elastic Cloud Office 365, SharePoint 13,16, and 19, and Service Now. It also provides connectors to many content repositories for simultaneous search. When multiple indices cannot be combined into one, its Search Orchestration product sends the query to multiple indices at once, and combines the results. SmartHub Analytics provides recommendations based on the individual’s context to support personalized relevance. BA Insight’s Auto-Classifier tags new and existing content, enriching metadata for an improved search experience. SmartHub uses this information to support concept searching that improves the relevancy of search results.

The future of search

For the future, Coleman sees greater use of conversational interfaces, and search functions that are fully integrated with other applications and highly context-sensitive, with help readily available. “Our bot already provides guidance to users who may be having trouble with their search strategy,” he commented. “For example, it can recommend a previous similar query, or recommend that a filter be removed to allow for a less restrictive search. The whole idea of digital systems is focused on helping people find information faster and more easily, both responsively and proactively.”