With the maturing of technologies such as natural language understanding, conversational interfaces and analytics, how can we design better search experiences? I explore these topics in this presentation for the Intranets 2017 Conference in Sydney.

1. Next gen search
experiences
Maish Nichani,
Principal at PebbleRoad Pte Ltd,
Singapore
maish@pebbleroad.com

2. Outline
Advances in search tech
Demos
How it works
How to make it work for you

3. Welcome to the 4th
industrial revolution

4. Macroeconomic

5. “In the long run,
we’re evolving in
computing from a
‘mobile-first’ to an
‘AI-first’ world.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai

6. The big shift
Pages to answers

7. Search: What if...
Search technology
● Natural language
understanding
● Content analytics
● Data visualisation
● Machine learning
● Conversational interfaces

8. Demos

11. Under the hood
Your content Content
analytics
Entity, fact
and concept
extraction
Knowledge
graph
Answers,
calculations
Intent
analysis
Understand
what the user
needs
Natural
language
input
Text, voice
and other
natural inputs

12. Making search work

13. The story so far
I want search
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY

14. The story so far
I want search!
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY

15. The story so far
I want it to work like
Google
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY

16. The story so far
I just want to find
stuff to do my job!
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY

17. The story so far
Help
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY

18. The story so far
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY
© Findwise Enterprise Search and Findability Survey
2016
Organisations with more than one FTE in a
search programme

19. The story so far
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY
© AIIM Search and Discovery Survey 2014
Resource requirements for search

20. What’s coming for enterprises
USER SEARCH TEAM TECHNOLOGY
Knowledge graph
Taxonomies, Ontologies, Extraction of
structure (entities, facts, concepts)
Natural language input
Data visualisation
Machine learning
Open source search
I want you to know my needs
I want rich answers, not documents
I want to interact naturally, not just with
keywords
There is no doubt that the success of the
next gen search is going to rest on the
availability and talent of the search team -
just like it has always been.
Just that in today’s age, it will matter more
to the survival of the business than ever
before.

21. Takeaways

22. Form a dedicated
search team.
Recruit people who
can align search to
business needs.
Create specialised
search experiences.
This moves the
needle for your team,
dept and organisation.
Choose your search
stack based on your
business needs.
Don’t fall prey to
magical out-of-the-box
solutions.
Think big
Start small
Scale fast

23. Thank you