Might AI Spell The Death Of Search?
Image: Depositphotos
Source: COGNITIVE WORLD on Forbes
Just think for a moment about how much online searching you do. Need to find a nearby Thai restaurant? Just type your query into the search engine and presto: You receive page after page of results listing eateries in your area offering Pad Thai. Need to know the forecast in Austin? Again, punch in your query and you will receive no shortage of pages offering three-day forecasts, five-days forecasts, even year-round averages.
This is the world we now inhabit. Even people who grew up before the internet have come to accept what cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has termed “The Googlization of Everything” — the idea that anything we need to know can be accessible if we type in our query and wade through page after page of results.
But here’s a question that may not have occurred to you: Why must you search at all? After all, querying is a recent phenomenon, and as know, we are living through an unprecedented historical period in which technology is evolving so fast that once cutting-edge innovations introduced just a few years ago now appear laughably quaint. Personal Digital Assistants, anyone?
Surprisingly, bafflingly, the one area of technology central to our lives — search — somehow has not evolved to keep up with the times. Until now.
“This is the first time since 1994 when the search paradigm has changed, says David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light, a Boston-based strategic research portal provider I consult with that offers a cloud-based SaaS to global enterprises. “In 1994, you went to a search box, filled in a query, hit the search button, and received a list of documents. You manually reviewed these, picking the most relevant item to download. Fast forward to 2019 and it’s still the same thing. Find me one other part of the tech landscape that has not changed since the ’90s, whether it be broadband, wireless, mobile cloud computing, artificial intelligence — everything has changed. Everything except search.”
Seuss attributes the dearth of innovation to a lack of imagination even though research has shown users feel frustrated with the status quo search model. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount of entries per query, “the average user won’t go past the first five listings on a search engine results page (SERP),” writes Madeline Jacobson for Leverage Marketing. Why? There is too much available content insufficiently organized, leading users to often accept initial results, even if they’re not ideal. “Most people will click on one of the first few results because they’ve found what they’re looking for, don’t want to scroll further, are short on time, or some combination of the three,” writes Jacobson.
Neil Patel, named one of the top 10 marketers by Forbes, brings home the present reality with a joke: “Where should you bury something that you don’t want people to find? Answer: On the second page of Google.” Though Patel cites the fact that 75 percent of users never scroll past the first results page, this problem is no laughing matter. Even if relying on the first two pages of results has come to be expected, especially when pages number in the hundreds, this modus operandi is detrimental for the information field. Too much important research is getting shelved into obscurity just because the field of search hasn’t kept up with the times. If anything, it’s gotten harder to get the information we need because results tend to skew toward paid advertisers and companies who game searching through SEO maneuvers.
Based on these types of frustrations it’s understandable that millennials, now comprising more than 35 percent of the workforce, have begun to push back on the way we search. Instead of relying on the manual querying model with all of its time-sucking and less-than-effective research implications, the new generation is paving the way for what’s being dubbed a “browse to content” model emphasizing information gathering and acquiring insights from numerous trusted, curated sources.
“Millennials are different than Boomers and Gen-Xers in how they approach information gathering,” says Seuss. “For Boomers and Gen-Xers, search was the radical change in their professional lives. They went from having to go to a corporate library and browse magazines on shelves to being able to go online and find information instantly. As a result, Boomers and Gen-Xers are personal research-oriented and search-oriented. Millennials, on the other hand, grab and move on. Speed is the primary ingredient in successful information delivery to Millennials. The truth is they are extremely efficient information gatherers and extremely effective at acquiring relevant insights when the tools are right and designed for their cognitive style.”
Though millennials may be the most adept at this new browse-to-content model, savvy business executives already have begun implementing new search modalities. It makes sense these two seemingly disparate groups would be pioneers of this search tactic; after all, they share key personal characteristics. Both are forever rushing around, feeling starved for time. Both also resent the antiquated hunting, pecking, downloading rinse and repeat search model of yesteryear, favoring instead the efficacious curated or “storytelling” model leading to advancements in competitive intelligence (CI.)
So what is this new storytelling research model? And how is possible to finally achieve technological breakthroughs in the field of search, a sector that has resisted evolution for so long? We need look no further than machine learning for the secret sauce. With the help of A.I., tasks once relegated to flesh and blood researchers can be now accomplished by computers. Drawing on the latter’s pattern-forming and predictive abilities, it can observe users’ actions, discerning their interests based on what they download, share, comment on or bookmark. Informed by this knowledge, an A.I. can proactively — and without manual prompting — recommend relevant content to users. Disrupting the traditional search model to its page ranking core, content can seek out the user instead of the other way around.
But machine learning promises even more dramatic search improvements. Anyone who receives RSS feeds or email alerts is probably aware of the benefits of collating desired content in so-called strategic dashboards. After all, publications such as The New York Times, have found tremendous benefit in being top-of-mind with readership by offering daily news briefings. What’s unique about what Northern Light offers through its A.I.-based platform is an up-to-the-second summarization of crucial content. “Instead of a user having to manually scroll through a search result list and individual documents to glean answers to a research question, the search engine reads all of the documents and summarizes the significance of the search result,” explains Seuss.
Such a distillation of actionable information can be pivotal to a company’s ability to stay current in an increasingly competitive business landscape where knowledge equals power — or at least leverage. Possessing the latest intel can be particularly invaluable to organizations in the IT space where lightning-fast developments and narrowing product life cycles can render today’s information useless tomorrow. Likewise, too many companies suffer from a deluge of information. They know they need to keep up with the latest information, but often find their efforts stymied by the sheer amount of data available from so many sources. Given the reality that research is constantly changing and quickly becoming obsolete, the smarter play can involve investing in a platform for aggregating and centralizing key content.
Seuss’ SinglePoint knowledge portal offers this type of service to its customers in various industries, including pharmaceutical, manufacturing, logistics, IT, and hospitality. Using a personalized approach for each client, it harvests business-relevant content from an array of content partners, such as Forrester, IDC, and Informa. Offering text analytics with extensive industry and business strategy taxonomies, and custom aggregation from syndicated secondary, primary internal, news, government, and web sources, it serves up content on demand for companies who live and die based on access to the latest competitive intelligence.
Beyond harvesting needed information to a central hub, Northern Light seeks to tackle another major frustration related to traditional searching: gleaning the most relevant, usable information in a timely manner. Most everyone is familiar with the annoying experience of manually sifting through result after result to find the desired content. To combat this universal pain point Northern Light has introduced its Insight Report. Powered by machine-learning, it automatically summarizes a document’s key ideas in its search results.
Importantly, the A.I. doesn’t rewrite the articles for SinglePoint’s clientele. Instead, using a proprietary algorithm, it extracts and presents the important “summary-worthy sentences,” defined as those declarative sentences making a statement and expressing a pithy idea. The “intelligence” in artificial intelligence comes into play once you realize the computer is almost instantaneously graphing all of the sentences in all of the documents onto the search results page. It does this to determine the relationships between them to synthesize the most important items a user needs to know. “The machine orders the report sentences as they appear in the documents first and also orders the document sentence grouping in the order the documents are on the search result,” explains Seuss.
Using this type of machine learning to reduce the strain on companies and individuals struggling to keep up with the staggering amount of information accruing daily (2.5 quintillion bytes) is proving more necessary than ever. It seems unbelievable to reflect on the fact that search, the very act most closely associated with the internet, hasn’t kept pace with our changing times. However, as continuing developments push technology from the realm of the conceivable into the possible, it’s not so far off to imagine the death of search, or at least the rise of search 2.0. Instead of relying on so much querying to achieve the knowledge we seek, a day may come when more and more information seeks us out, intelligently predicting what need to know. Now.
A former Disney story consultant, Michael is a screenwriting professor at Chapman University. He has written over twenty books on numerous subjects, including four bestsellers. He recently co-authored Own the A.I. Revolution: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition (McGraw Hill). The United Nations hosted the book launch at its AI for Good Global Summit in May. It has since been named by Soundview as one of 2019's top business books. Michael also recently published It's Saturday Morning: Celebrating the Golden Era of Cartoons (becker&mayer).
A contributor to several magazines, including Entrepreneur, Michael began his career as a reporter for the Columbia Missourian. An ambassador for CITY.AI, he has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, the National Examiner, the United Nations' ITU News, the Orange County Business Journal, and the Orange County Register. Michael serves as a professional speaker, delivering keynotes to business groups and guests on thought leader panels on subjects ranging from artificial intelligence to storytelling.