This year at Enterprise Search and Discovery Summit, Findwise was represented by us – search experts Simon Stenström and Amelia Andersson. With over a thousand attendees at the event, we’ve enjoyed the company of many peers. Let’s stay in touch for inspiration and to create magic over the Atlantic – you know who you are!
Amelia Andersson and Simon Stenström, search experts from Findwise
Back to the event: We opened the Enterprise Search-track with our talk on how you can improve your search solutions through taking several aspects of relevance into account. (The presentation can be found in full here, no video unfortunately). If you want to know more about how to improve relevancy feel free to contact us or download the free guide on Improved search relevancy.
A few themes kept reoccurring during the Enterprise Search-track; Machine learning and NLP, bots and digital assistants, statistics and logs and GDPR. We’ve summarized our main takeaways from these topics below.
Machine learning and NLP
Machine learning and NLP were the unchallenged buzzwords of the conference. Everybody wants to do it, some have already started working with it, and some provided products for working with it. Not a lot of concrete examples of how organizations are using machine learning were presented unfortunately, giving us the feeling that few organizations are there yet. We’re at the forefront!
Bots, QA systems and digital assistants
Everyone is walking around with Siri or Google assistant in their pocket, but still our enterprise search solutions don’t make use of it. Panels were discussing voice based search (TV remote controls that could search content on all TV channels to set the right channel, a demo om Amazon Alexa providing answers for simple procedures for medical treatments etc.) pointing out that voice-to-text is now working well enough (at least in English) to use in many mobile use cases.
But bots can of course be used without voice input. A few different examples of using bots in a dialog setting were showed. One of the most exciting demos showed a search engine powered bot that used facet values to ask questions to specify what information the user was looking for.
Statistics and logs
Collect logs! And when you’ve done that: Use them! A clear theme was how logs were stored, displayed and used. Knowledge managements systems where content creators could monitor how users were finding their information inspired us to consider looking at dashboard for intranet content creators as well. If we can help our content creators understand how their content is found, maybe they are encouraged to use better metadata or wordings or to create information that their users are missing.
GDPR
Surprisingly, GDPR is not only a “European thing”, but will have a global impact following the legislation change in May. American companies will have to look at how they handle the personal information of their EU customers. This statement took many attendees by surprise and there were many worried questions on what was considered non-compliant of GDPR.
We’ve had an exciting time in Washington and can happily say that we are able bring back inspiration and new experience to our customers and colleagues at Findwise. On the same subject, a couple of weeks ago some or our fellow experts at Findwise wrote the report “In search for Insight”, addressing the new trends (machine learning, NLP etc) in Enterprise Search. Make sure to get your copy of the report if you are interested in this area.
Most of the presentations from Enterprise Search and Discovery Summit can be found here.
Authors: Amelia Andersson and Simon Stenström, search experts from Findwise