SinglePoint’s search “out-Googles” users’ expectations

Google® is our cultural benchmark for internet search; the very brand name has been coopted into a verb meaning “to search the web”.

Google is also, in the eyes of the general public, the technical benchmark for search; that’s because for most people Google is all they know.

But searchers can do better than Google – in particular, professionals within an enterprise searching their market and competitive intelligence content to inform their business decisions.

Even in an era of declining search skills, and a Millennial workforce more accustomated to  “browsing” to content rather than searching for it, there still is tremendous value in the ability to accurately search for precisely the information one is looking for . . . and, even more importantly, to have that information, once found, presented in such a way as to make it easy and efficient to digest and assess.

As an enterprise knowledge management system for market and competitive intelligence, Northern Light SinglePoint™ does not compete with Google as a general web search engine.  Nonetheless, users come to SinglePoint with an expectation of what “search” is based on their use of Google in their personal lives.  They often say to us, “We want search as good as Google.”

And then they’re blown away – because SinglePoint’s search engine delivers so much more than what they get from Google.

The biggest visible difference is in the presentation of a “search result”.  With Google, users have come to expect a list of “hits” – typically web sites or articles – presented as a URL link with a title and a brief description.  But now, thanks to AI-based machine learning and sophisticated text analytics, it’s possible to deliver so much more.

For example, a search query in SinglePoint produces not just a list of document snippets and links, but what we call an Insights Report.  This report, generated automatically by the system using a knowledge graph, summarizes the most important ideas in each document on a search result.  So, by reviewing the Insights Report, the user can decide which documents are worth spending their valuable and limited time reading for more insight on the topic at hand.

SinglePoint is functionally superior to Google in less visible ways, too.  Most significantly, because all documents are deeply tagged according to relevant industry-specific taxonomies, it allows a user to discover relationships between the concept areas revealed in search results, which mitigates research barriers such as unfamiliar or unidentified concepts, symbols, acronyms, and aliases.  Using this helps the user uncover relevant business issues hidden in content, identify threats and opportunities regarding products, market share, pricing, new technologies, marketing partnerships, and business strategy.

While we’re quite proud of the functionality SinglePoint provides to professionals mining their organizations’ market and competitive intelligence content, we don’t expect them to start referring to their searches as “SinglePoints” or speak of “singlepointing” their market research reports.  (Though it sure would be cool if they did!)  We’re content to deliver search capability that’s better than Google.