Blog
AIGC and ‘search’ – more questions than answers
I’ve not blogged for several weeks, a combination of completing the text of my forthcoming book on workarounds and watching for the inevitable arrival of multiple AI-Generated Content (AIGC) applications. There was no way that OpenAI was going to dominate the market....
Assessing ‘AI-based’ enterprise search solutions Part 2 Entity extraction
Inside the enterprise there is a substantial world of corporate language that is challenging both to index and query. An element of this language is alphanumeric strings such as ER-OS-36X as the internal designation of a product, but I’ll come back to these in a...
Assessing ‘AI-based’ enterprise search solutions Part 1 Information confidentiality management
Even before the arrival of GPT-3/ChatBot and now GPT-4 there were many companies offering enterprise search solutions that claim to solve all the known challenges of enterprise search. I am sure that more will join them. Deciding on whether these solutions meet your...
Training employees in the effective use of enterprise search Part 2 – Subject search
Many search vendors present the ability to search all enterprise information resources as the definitive business case for their application. The reality is that very very few employees will need to search all these resources and they will probably be in senior...
Training employees in the effective use of enterprise search Part 1 – Name search
My TSN colleague Charlie Hull (Open Source Connections) has compiled a very helpful list of training resources and courses for members of a search team. I would like to focus on the training of employees. The seminal research paper by Paul Cleverley, Simon Burnett and...
Do you have an acceptable use policy for ChatGPT?
There is of course a range of text generation applications but for the purposes of this post I will use ChatGPT as a generic tag. I’m in the middle of writing a book on workarounds and am starting to see ChatGPT as a Workaround Machine. A recent online survey by...
Foundation models – some issues that seem not yet to have been addressed.
In my post on the Alan Turing Institute Foundation Models event I noted that the event had helped me develop a list of issues that were not discussed at the event. This is not a criticism of the event – the event could easily have run to three days and still there...
Exploring foundation models – an Alan Turing Institute symposium 22 February 2023
This symposium, organized by the Alan Turing Institute, was held at the IET, Savoy Place, and attracted around 350 delegates, including what seemed to be the entire UK machine learning research community. There were seven presentations and a panel session that I was...
Putting the index at the centre of enterprise search – a research commentary
Although a lot of attention is paid to information retrieval research the techniques of index construction and management are much more of a black art. One reason for this is that search index performance is a competitive advantage to a cloud vendor. The basis of the...
“Information retrieval – recent advances and beyond”. A research commentary
A feature of the SearchResearch Online blog will be commentaries on recent research papers that have relevance to enterprise search managers, and also to academic research teams and vendor development teams. Each commentary will have a Bottom Line at the end that...
Enterprise search – just some of the challenges
Enterprise search – just some of the challenges It seems to me that many enterprise search vendors are selling an ‘instant AI solution’ and their marketing suggests that they have little understanding of the requirements and challenges of enterprise search,...
Search eight ways
At the present moment ‘search’ is being used by the AI community (especially in the context of ChatGPT) as a generic product. The reality is that there are at least eight facets of search, each with their own particular requirements. A very brief (and inevitably...