Search Was Yesterday
In reference to a love song from the band “Foreigner”, I chose the title to this blog post. At the TechConference in Atlanta, end of June, the most recent tech developments inside and outside of Wolters Kluwer met the latest and also well-known customer requirements from our different target groups. For me it became clear during the conference that the answers around search – that we currently offer to solve our customer’s problems – are indeed not more than a specific facet anymore.
Our customers need us more than ever
The pressure on our customers concerning efficiency and liability at the same time, is growing. The usage of new media including mobile devices and the benefits of the Social Web help them to become more flexible and faster at the same time, but currently the price that comes with it is that many different communication and information channels must be developed and maintained.
Wolters Kluwer is certainly going into these areas with dedicated initiatives and first findings from information usage in e.g. mobile environments or across product and platform boundaries indicate that we can greatly enhance the customer’s experience by moving beyond the current search paradigm around keyword search and post search filters alone.
This entails further information extraction and content enrichment efforts, so that different pieces of content and metadata can serve different information needs in heterogenous environments.
But with answers – not documents
We have to find ways to give our customers what they expect from us: Answers – not documents.
IBM’s Watson is following exactly this new paradigm, but even without a supercomputer at hand, we can build the necessary knowledge models in order to achieve what our customers need. I will go in more detail about that in my next post, but as a first glimpse I’d say that Semantic Web technologies, Linked Open Data initiatives and governmental funded projects like LOD2 are important cornerstones to get the job done.
Although I like and therefore chose the pop song as an anchor point here, I definitely do not agree with its ending:
Goodbye yesterday
Now it’s over and done
Still I hope somewhere deep in your heart
Yesterday will live on
Christian,
I fully agree. The focus must be on getting customers ever closer to answers. I do agree that “search” is part of a much bigger solution. Interestingly, I find myself thinking of the queries posed to IBM’s Watson as “searches”. We now can again ask the question, “What is search?”. Perhaps we are in an era when search is being redefined.
John,
thanks for you comment!
Indeed, I think that using one single term “search” for a big variety of scenarios like receiving millions of documents on the one extreme and a proper answer like “42″ on the other one, makes communication about where we as Wolters Kluwer should put our money quite difficult.
So as you mentioned, a redefinition of search makes a lot of sense to me.
Thanks for the post. While some customers may appreciate the answer rather than a document I guess scientists would welcome the original document enriched with raw data and linked where possible.