Create the Cure for your Zombie Search Engine
In every zombie apocalypse movie since The Omega Man invented the genre in 1971, there is a powerful new cure that saves the world in the end from the zombies. This theme continued unbroken in hit movies up until and through the last decade in films like I Am Legend and World War Z. In these movies Charlton Heston, Will Smith, or Brad Pitt as the hero star always comes through. That reminds us of the problems of traditional search engines. (Ha ha, you are probably thinking everything reminds us of the problems of traditional search engines!)
But back to the point. The common search engine is dead. Worse than dead. It’s a zombie. Like a denizen of some lifeless post-apocalyptic industrial hellscape, it still shuffles around the online universe spitting out research results to make you think it’s still alive and worth caring about. But the common search engine is a product of another time. Another epoch. And the world has moved on.
The demise of the common search engine can be attributed to two inherently fatal problems with its design:
- Traditional search engines require you to understand the topic well-enough that you can know the precise keywords that will lead you to the information you desire. However, business researchers often don’t know more than what the topic is. For example, they may be interested in learning more about how to market to Millennials, but not know what the issues are that Millennials view as important. They don’t know what they don’t know, and keyword search can be brutal in this case.
- Traditional search engines rank search results using statistical relevance to the search terms without regard to how important the ideas in the research reports or news articles This means a user has to slog through a long list of relevant but possibly unimportant search results to find reports and articles that are actually insightful.
Because of these deficits, your company’s market research and CI teams can easily miss key insights that are mission-critical to your company’s success. Your search engine-of-choice may overlook the information entirely or bury it so deep on its list of search results that your organization skips right by or mistakenly concludes it’s irrelevant. Either way, it spells bad news for your company’s ability to react quickly and decisively to changes in the business environment.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a next-generation search engine customized to seek the information most important to your organization, and that presented its results in a way that best met your needs, interests, and priorities? And, unlike zombie engines, this one could grow, evolve, and get better with every use, just like a flesh-and-blood human being? Imagine the work hours your company could save with such a powerful, flexible system. Imagine the insights your company could obtain. Imagine the competitive edge your business would have over rivals still slogging through unimportant search results from lowest-common-denominator search applications.
SinglePoint from Northern Light is the powerful, customizable search engine we have just described. Creating a SinglePoint knowledge management system for your business begins with identification of the issues your industry is facing, your business challenges, your goals, and the competitive landscape in which you operate. Using this information, we create a customized, company-branded set of digital dashboards that includes content and insights you deem relevant.
Finally, we add our secret ingredient: Machine Learning. SinglePoint is built on a cutting-edge machine learning platform that partners with every authorized user during the search process. Instead of just displaying your typical list of search results and their corresponding hyperlinks, SinglePoint uses its highly refined machine learning to summarize all the information it finds, revealing the most salient insights and even writing a report for you. For example, search on “marketing to Millennials” and the search engine might identify sustainable packaging as an issue, and then find reports that suggest that Millennials are willing to pay more for sustainable products – even though the user didn’t know those were issues and didn’t include any keywords about packaging and pricing. This is a profound breakthrough in how search engines work.
SinglePoint’s superpowers don’t stop there. By watching what each user downloads, it rapidly learns what topics are the most relevant and contain the most actionable information for that user. Then it starts monitoring the incoming flow of new research and news to find those items that will be most interesting and useful for the user. In effect, each user gets a personalized, smart AI-based search assistant working for them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So, ignore the zombies still hanging around your computer desktop masquerading as search results. Create the cure in your organization that saves your users from the apocalypse and be your organization’s equivalent of Charlton Heston, Will Smith, or Brad Pitt!
For More Information
For more information on SinglePoint and how we can help your company bring its CI searches back to life, click here to get started. Or contact us to start a conversation.