Why SinglePoint’s search beats Microsoft SharePoint (or any other KM platform) for mining market and competitive intelligence research
As anyone who has ever “put something away” – an article of clothing, a household tool, a holiday ornament – only to forget where they put it knows, having something is only valuable if you can find it when you want or need it.
So it is with market and competitive intelligence (CI) information for a business. Technology is supposed to make it easy to access information, yet many companies that seek out Northern Light tell us that hasn’t been their experience with Microsoft SharePoint® or another knowledge management platform they use for CI. Their common refrain is: Search in our system is terrible!
Users of Northern Light SinglePoint™ never say that. That’s because Northern Light’s search engine is optimized for business research and, thanks to our 60,000-term business research taxonomies and deep tagging of every document contained in a portal, delivers the best search results possible.
SinglePoint offers unparalleled indexing
Northern Light indexes the full-text and all the metadata for search. Keyword searches search the full text, all the metadata, and all the tags. Our relevance ranking is tuned for business research in a variety of important ways. We can use advanced syntax for precise search results; specific capabilities include: Boolean expressions (and, or, not) and compound Boolean expressions, phrase search, proximity search, case sensitive search, acronym search, stemmed (default, expands to all parts of speech) and unstemmed search, search metadata or in combination with full text, concept search using Northern Light’s MI Analyst taxonomies (which can be customized to a client), and supports extremely large queries.
Northern Light indexes documents, video, audio and dashboards for search. Text on images is indexed as well. All these content types are returned on search results. For audio and video files there is the option of transcribing the audio tracks and indexing the transcriptions with time stamps every few seconds. Search results are presented along a timeline so users can skip ahead to the relevant places in the videos. Clips of search term usage can be downloaded and placed in PowerPoint presentations.
Northern Light’s 60,000-term taxonomies
All documents and transcripts of videos, etc. are automatically tagged with Northern Light’s 60,000-term taxonomies. Northern Light taxonomies learn and can be taught industry / corporate lexicons and are being enhanced all the time by various processes including referencing authorities (e.g., for drugs the NIH publishes a list of new drugs in their MeSH taxonomy), client suggestions (e.g., SPIA), corporate lexicons submitted by clients, and research by Northern Light librarians.
Northern Light deployed automatic, full-text tagging of all client content in 2009. We have more cumulative experience at automatic tagging than all other market and competitive intelligence platform providers combined. Northern Light holds a half dozen fundamental patents for automatic tagging of business and technical content, and it is unlikely that a competitor could offer sophisticated automatic tagging at the same level Northern Light does without violating one of our patents.
In short, the search frustrations that users of other market and competitive intelligence platforms experience are alien to SinglePoint users. And Northern Light has applied generative AI to our search results – every document is automatically summarized, and the overall result is available as an automatically generated “executive summary” – enabling SinglePoint users to save vast amounts of time on every research project.
So don’t waste another minute on sub-par searches!