Metasearch: the latest in accurate search solutions at KMWorld 2023
What happened to the Information Age? We are now overloaded with information. There are more silos than ever. We still spend far more time looking for information than we do reading it.
At KMWorld 2023, Sid Probstein, president, Swirl and Jim Ford, president and chief strategy officer, Semantic AI talked “Metasearch: The Missing Element for Enterprise Search” during their session in the Enterprise Search & Discovery track.
Probstein and Ford think the move to the cloud and the rise of AI provide real benefits for the large enterprise.
Probstein explained that we have already heard all the hype around AI before, comparing this enthusiasm to when Google search first burst on the scene.
“It’s not an AI problem, the tab is the problem,” Probstein said.
Ubiquitous connectivity and the ability of large language models (LLMs) to contextualize almost any text suddenly makes metasearch—sending queries to existing silos, and then re-ranking the results—a game-changer, he explained.
“You’re not moving your data, you’re moving the query or the question,” Probstein said.
Swirl offers a powerful solution for identifying and using information. Swirl was launched in 2022 and operates under the Apache 2.0 license, according to Probstein.
“One search box to rule it all,” Ford said. “That’s a metasearch.”
Metasearch is a way people can add more value, drive down costs, increase ROI, and provide a smoother and holistic customer experience, Ford said.
“When my customers ask a question, they need to get a precise answer,” Ford said. “We don’t want them to ask, ‘What did I miss?’”
After Probstein and Ford explained the metasearch, Stin Mattu, product marketing manager - contact center products, Upland Software, linked the solution to customer service and contact centers.
“When we talk about knowledge management it’s really the difference between success and failure within an organization,” Mattu said. “It is important to think about search and how our customers are feeling when they want to find things.”
With things moving along with AI, a KM solution to improve the customer experience should include natural language understanding, federated search, and generative answers.
KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 6-9, with pre-conference workshops held on November 6.
KMWorld 2023 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.