Dealing with data is a big deal for any organisation. Not only is there a lot of it, but organisations also have a responsibility for what they do with that data. Legislation such as GDPR and CCPA means that organisations must be able to find and provide customers with any and all data they hold on them at any time. How easily can your organisation pull up these files when needed? Enterprise search solutions aim to make this as easy and intuitive as searching Google.
Keeping On Top Of Data
Many organisations already produce far more data than they are capable of processing and making use of. Moreover, research estimates that around 80% of business data is unstructured. What this means is that the data is not stored in a particular format or structure – instead, it is spread out across many different files and locations, from emails and spreadsheets to text documents and social media imagery. Due to this lack of structure and unified data source, it is very difficult for many organisations to keep on top of all their data, despite the necessity of doing so.
Enterprise search solutions seek to solve this problem, by taking in your unstructured data and using tools and techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to gather and make sense of all this data without requiring manual intervention. It’s as simple as using the hundreds of different in-built connectors to integrate all of your internal and external data sources into a single location for data discovery.
Search Smarter
Enterprise search helps unify all of your organisation’s data in one place, but that’s not the only purpose of it. Once all of your organisation’s data has been connected, data discovery can begin. This is the process of analyzing all of your data sources to find links and establish relationships between data sets. This is augmented by NLP to create more powerful and meaningful searches beyond basic keyword recognition – for example, by understanding context and meaning, different terms with similar meanings can be automatically linked – such as ‘company expense reports’ and ’employee reimbursement policies’, for example. With basic keyword-dependent searches, these two terms would generate very different results, but by leveraging machine learning, enterprise search solutions can not only link common terms like these but also terms specific to your organisation or industry, without being specifically trained to do so.
Integrate Semantic Search Data
Enterprise search solutions go further beyond simply unifying data and establishing links between different data sources. It also uses semantic search to provide even more relevant search results with no additional effort. Semantic search considers not only the search query itself but also the intent and meaning behind the search query. For example, if a user were to search for “Windows”, do they mean glass windows for a building or the operating system made by Microsoft?
Enterprise search solutions use semantic search to help reduce and resolve the ambiguity without requiring additional effort on behalf of the user. Instead, contextual clues are used to narrow down the meaning automatically. These clues are derived from a range of sources, such as the searcher’s location, search history, and role within an organisation. All of these can be used to help provide clues as to search intent, which helps enterprise search solutions to deliver the most relevant results without requiring the end-user to specify.
Expanding Beyond Text
For many organisations, their business data is not limited to text-based documents. Visual imagery, videos, audio files, slideshows, and plenty more data are all extremely relevant to organisations, but their format can make searching for them difficult. Not only that, but with the rise in significance of mobile and tablet devices, many search engines are now offering voice search options.
Multimedia search is becoming an increasing priority for many organisations, both to tame their data and to respond to wider search trends. Visual and voice search are becoming increasingly popular search tools that open up possibilities beyond simple text-based searches.
Enterprise search solutions are future-facing and primed to deliver multimedia search engines that allow employees to search organisational data in a range of different styles and formats. Can’t find all of your branded logos for a project? Simply upload one as an example. Or, quickly search organisational data on the road by speaking into your phone. All of these possibilities make searching easier and more intuitive for your employees, by adapting the search engine to the search query, rather than the other way around.
Conclusion
Keeping on top of all of your organization’s data is no easy task, no matter the size. A range of formats, storage locations, languages, and other factors all make it extremely difficult to manually reconcile all of your organisation’s data when trying to find specific information. Simple but naive keyword-dependent search engines also struggle to find and deliver the most relevant information from all available sources.
Enterprise search solutions offer organisations a professional search engine capable of handling unstructured data in many different formats, storage locations, and languages. Employees can use natural search terms and expressions to find data across a variety of formats, from emails to videos, images, and spreadsheets, enabling them to do their work faster and more productively.
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