When you are searching for something, which stubbornly doesn’t want to be found, do you sometimes feel like this picture? I do too.
Vendors in the marketplace all have their particular spin on what improving search actually means (we do too). Is findabilty great, yup. But what does insight actually mean. To us it means the ability to find concepts and related concepts from a large corpus of content and present it to the user. We call that insight, as it isn’t just about ‘finding’ information, it’s about distilling that information to find exactly what you need, when you need it.
The second building block in our Smart Content Framework™ is Insight. Some companies have termed it ‘findability’. But in search, the key goal is to identify the extract the valuable nuggets of content that the end user is seeking, moving search and beyond findability to insight.
The two key performance measures for information retrieval are precision and recall. The ideal solution is to have them balanced. Precision is the retrieval of only those items that are relevant to the query. Recall is the retrieval of all items that are relevant to the query. Higher precision often leads to missing items that may be relevant to the query but may use a different vocabulary. Higher recall often leads to the retrieval of too many items that may be unrelated to the query. Regardless of the enterprise search solution, the delivery of meaningful results depends on the ability to effectively index and classify content, and to develop taxonomies to better manage the content.
The search engine itself provides the features, functions, and interface, while the classification structure delivers relevant results. Transforming content into knowledge assets can lead to better decision making and business agility, but only works when the content can be found.
That is the difference between search, findability, and insight.
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