Search — or at least Search as most of us understand it in terms of Googling something — is getting quite the spotlight with the continued innovations in AI and generative chatbots.
But search practitioners of all kinds are seeing the renewed importance for relevance on their own sites, and will be looking to AI’s potential in helping achieve that often difficult goal.
“Today’s digital journey often spans engagements in mobile, desktop, tablet, and social media across websites, in-store experiences, and various other touchpoints,” says the authors of the recent Lucidworks study, entitled Critical Challenges Facing Today’s Search Practitioners.
“When stitched together the right way, all of those touchpoints (including the behavior-intent data captured from users) can be utilized to greatly improve the relevance of a customer or employee search.”
In all, 76% of the more than 50,000 search practitioners surveyed said that search relevance will be “more important” to deliver in the future, with 40% believing that relevant search would take more effort. Additionally, 88% said AI would be either extremely or very important to delivering relevant search results.
The key areas where AI excels, according to the study, are data analyzation, natural language processing, user personalization through machine-learning algorithms, and identifying and omitting low-quality results.
“AI will not solve all search issues,” says Melissa Hill, Lucidworks’ VP Product Management, “but harnessing what it does best — complex processes at scale — is a natural application to the immense data sets and models that help make search and browse more relevant.”
SEE FOR YOURSELF
The Magazine Manager is a web-based CRM solution designed to help digital and print publishers manage sales, production, and marketing in a centralized platform.
