Are we approaching the end of search?

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

David Seuss, Northern Light CEO, discussed users' frustrations with the current business research process and what it means for the future of search in  his presentation at KMWorld Connect 2020.

"So, what are we hearing from our users? All of those 250,000 people, what are they, what are they telling us? Well, they're telling us they hate the business research process," Seuss sid. "They don't like running searches and getting long lists of reports and news articles and having to slog through them and read some small percentage of it and try to figure out what it all means. The questions the users are posing to us are like these, like this one. Why do I have to read all those reports and articles on the search results? Why can't the search engine? Just read them for me and tell me what it finds at Northern light. We think we're approaching the end of search. At least the end of just search. Uh, we are approaching an era when users will no longer search for information, they will expect the machine to analyze and then summarize for them what they need to know to do these things."

Search is evolving. Now it needs to have an in-depth understanding of the search material and the ways of knowing and the user's knowledge domain, according to Seuss.

The search engine needs to know what the human being who was using it would find significant and then serve that up to the user. By using analytics and machine learning, search is now able to distinguish what is important and to summarize those important ideas in a document across documents and across content sources. And these changes are profound and machine based techniques will change everything you are doing in your competitive intelligence knowledge management system.