Intelligent search, powered by artificial intelligence technology, eliminates data silos and helps employees and customers find the information they need quickly and easily.
End users can use intelligent search to extract information from anywhere (inside or outside your company) and in data sets regardless of the format: big data in databases, document management systems, digital content, webpages, on paper, wherever. Intelligent search and enterprise search are synonymous with natural language search, AI search or AI-powered search, and cognitive search.
Enterprise information retrieval systems came into existence long before the public internet did. One of the earliest benefits to implementing multi-user mainframe computer systems was that they facilitated information discovery by finding exact matches to text strings in large document repositories.
With the growth of desktop computing and corporate intranets, commercial enterprise search solutions, such as the IBM Storage and Information Retrieval System (STAIRS) and the local search tool FAST (later acquired by Microsoft), became mainstream in enterprise computing.
However, the rise and popularization of free, publicly accessible web search engines, such as Google (and its predecessor AltaVista), radically transformed user expectations for information retrieval, content discovery and enterprise search platforms.
In the face of rapid growth in the volume and variety of data that enterprise search tools must examine, result retrieval speed has become a key indicator of cognitive search algorithm performance. Today’s intelligent search solutions must be built on architectures that can handle the performance demands of big data workloads. Because they deliver the necessary scalability, cloud infrastructures with extensive API-driven integrations and automation are usually best suited for the task.
Businesses can't use Google or other traditional search engines to find business-specific answers, such as "why is our new product shipment delayed?" or "what were our top reported customer challenges last week?" Intelligent search, unlike search engines and web search (such as Bing, Google Search, or AskJeeves), surfaces information and answers specific to your business.
Artificial Intelligence powers Intelligent search, equipping tools with the ability to:
Intelligent search compares terms within natural language queries against the content in its indexed information.
Businesses store documents and data across multiple sources in unstructured and structured forms. On average, employees waste 3 hours each workday searching for information.
Finding insights and answers in your company’s unstructured data should be easy. It's time for your business to become data-driven with intelligent search.
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