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Blog

Search Orchestration: A Deep Dive

Posted on September 23, 2019June 23, 2020 by Sean Coleman - CTO and Chief Customer Officer

Search orchestration is a heavily used method for querying multiple search indices at once, and then providing the results of those queries back to users on the internet. Many sites, including travel sites like Kayak, Booking, Expedia, Priceline, TripIt!, and Orbitz search multiple search indices in the background, and then combine these results and present them to you.  The same is true of online shopping sites like Nextag, PriceGrabber, Google Shopping, Bing Shopping, and Shopzilla, which aggregate and deliver comparison pricing for you.

The concept is also used by Office365 Home Search where orchestrated results for three separate search indices for content “In SharePoint”, “In your OneDrive”, and in “Links and attachments in email” are presented in a single interface.  Bing for Business also does this by combining results from the SharePoint Online index with the primary Bing search index.  In this blog I will discuss Search Orchestration’s application to enterprise search.

When Should Search Orchestration Be Used?

  • When Indexing Is Not Feasible
    If your enterprise search strategy includes incorporating content from the web, subscription services, and/or social media, Orchestration is the answer. It is impractical for organizations to try and replicate web indexes, and subscription services (Bloomberg, LinkedIn, or LexisNexis, for example) do not allow crawling. In terms of Social Media, it is better to include a service like Topsy (or Twitter itself) in an Orchestrated Search.
  • When Compliance Dictates Multiple Indices
    Data originating in certain geographical areas or containing specific types of data (for example PII) may be required to remain on specific infrastructure or in a specific location.  In these instances, an orchestrated search deployment allows this data to be included in the search deployment.
  • When Indexing is Not Effective
    It may not be feasible to scale search infrastructure to support billions of files when those files have individual value rather than group value.  Take OneDrive and Exchange for example. Each user may have thousands of files and emails that are valuable to them individually, but those same files aren’t valuable or even accessible to other users.  It does not make sense to include those files into the core central index.

When Should Search Orchestration Not Be Used?

  • When Metadata is Not Sufficient
    The availability of quality metadata from the varied sources of information necessitates a metadata generation capability.  Metadata generation solutions (like our AutoClassifier) integrate into the content ingestion processes.  In a Search Orchestration scenario, this ability is likely not available, providing no solution to the metadata gap.
  • When Relevancy Needs Improvement
    Orchestrated sources have a “fire and forget” aspect, which prevents the search application from adjusting or modifying the relevancy of returned results.  Search applications will find their hands tied in terms of the relevancy of results returned from those sources.
  • When Personalization is Needed
    Adjusting queries and results to account for user location, department, role, and individual interest just scratches the surface of the level of personalization that users will expect.   Orchestrated sources will face issues with applying personalization strategies due to the lack of direct access to the underlying index.
  • When Enhanced Applications are Needed
    Enhanced applications can provide additional capabilities to help end users.  An example of an enhanced application would be NLP text engines like Linguamatics, and time saving tools like our Smart Previews.  An orchestrated content source would not be able to provide the document level access required to support these tools.

Pros and Cons

  • Orchestration Pros
    • Can include existing sources of large datasets
    • Can address compliancy requirements
    • Reduced search infrastructure
    • Avoids indexing content not valuable to multiple users
    • Can be deployed quickly
  • Orchestration Cons
    • May be limited in terms of UI capabilities
    • Cannot generate additional metadata
    • Cannot modify relevancy
    • Cannot apply personalization
    • Cannot enable enhanced applications

Advice

1. Spend Time Designing the Right UI

The core decision to be made here is providing the results in a single integrated set of results or in a dedicated section specifically for the source.  Our advice is to push for an integrated set of results first and fall back on the dedicated section.  This gives the user fewer areas to look in and will prevent the orchestrated results from being an afterthought.

2. Level the Relevancy

Don’t follow a round robin interleaving strategy.  Analyze how the orchestrated source communicates the relevancy score for the results it has provided and “level” these scores across sources.  This will allow you to ensure that the mix of results provided to users contain the most relevancy results, regardless of the source they are returned from.

 

Read more about BA Insight’s SmartHub powered orchestration capabilities here.

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged AutoClassification, Federated Search, Metadata.
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Perspectives from our CEO,
Massood Zarrabian

Organizations have long been struggling with how to make knowledge assets available to employees, partners, and customers. Although there have been major technological advances in how this information is captured and made available over the past two decades, these have mostly been around a single business process. For example, when I joined Servicesoft, we were pioneering the idea of using search and classification engines to help transfer information to customers as part of the emerging eService market. At OutStart, we initiated the idea of objectifying learning and making the development of learning component-based so that it could be consumed via a “just-in-time” model. This meant that learners interacted only with learning objects that helped them increase their knowledge, and therefore their value, to the organization. In the last decade, another silo of information capture has emerged in the form of Social Business Software, making it easier than ever to capture nuggets of knowledge that can help others.  The interesting dynamic in all of this is that there are large investments being made to capture information and knowledge assets, but very little of it is actually accessible by employees or customers.

In the ‘90s, multiple software vendors tried to address the issue of information access by providing software to implement portals, whether they were used for helpdesk integration, customer support, intranets, or R&D to help with the collaboration and reuse of IP.  As the technology evolved and search engines and appliances became available, the portals were replaced with implementations of enterprise search. The problem with this approach is that it views the search engine as a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as opposed to viewing it as an enabling technology that helps organizations address a business issue. Failed enterprise search projects became the norm as companies tried, and continue trying, to resolve their information access challenges by implementing new search appliances while they still have underlying issues around integration with other systems, classification and tagging, and a sub-par user experience.

I joined BA Insight because I saw an immense opportunity to transform the way enterprise search is being implemented.  I am sure you know that the amount of content that is being generated is growing exponentially across an increasing number of sources, and the inability to find the information assets our people need is costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity while leading to low morale and customer dissatisfaction.

When I evaluated the opportunity at BA Insight, I found the company to be uniquely positioned to provide a new approach to the unification of information that stops the pattern of enterprise search failures.  We do this by transforming SharePoint, which has become ubiquitous across enterprises, into a unified information access platform that enables fast implementation of search-driven applications at a fraction of the cost of other options while de-risking search projects.

There are many notable and successful search-driven applications available on the Consumer Internet. Many are ‘killer apps’, and as a class they have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information.  However, in comparison, corporate Intranets, customer support portals, helpdesk applications or knowledge management solutions don’t come close to being killer apps, nor do they provide a remarkable user experience.

I found it intriguing that BA Insight has the technology, people, and partners to help catapult enterprise search to the next level.  We replace a people-intensive, SI-oriented approach to implementation with a technology-based approach that is lower cost, lower risk, easier to implement, and easier to upgrade. We do the heavy lifting to make our products work with different versions of SharePoint as well as various versions of other software applications that exist within a customer’s infrastructure.  We automate how content is tagged to improve findability and also provide out of the box capabilities to improve the user experience with how information is found and accessed.

I believe that in order for a company to be wildly successful, it must demonstrate the following five important attributes:

First is customer-centricity. Customers put their trust in startups with a vision, and we must partner with them to make sure they succeed. I am so proud of all of the customers I have had the honor of serving, as well as their achievements, and I consider it the cornerstone of my past success and BA Insight’s future success.

Second is our team. Our people have the experience and the desire to help our customers implement and deploy incredibly powerful applications. We want to help our customers build killer apps, as opposed to search portals. This is a team of high energy, committed, customer-centric experts who have embraced the idea that search-driven applications could be a lot better and are working to change how they get implemented.  I am fortunate enough to have become part of the BA Insight team and am so proud of everyone who works here. In a short period of time, we have made incredible progress on many fronts and I feel strongly that everyone’s loyalty and belief in the company will continue to provide an incredible depth for us and help our customers transform how they work with search technology.

Third is the technology. We have a broad set of capabilities that extend the value of existing SharePoint investments, so we eliminate the need to change the underlying infrastructure, saving a lot of time and money.  We have over 90 out of the box connectors, a world class auto-tagging engine for content within and outside of SharePoint, visual refiners to let users drill down and find information quickly, an active workspace with content assembly, and document preview capabilities.  We also provide a lot of flexibility in how our technology can be implemented.  Our full platform, for example, is particularly well-suited for new projects.  On the other hand, if search-driven applications have already been implemented within an organization, then components of our platform can be leveraged to augment the existing technology to improve results.

Fourth is to be financially responsible. Company success is about investment and return on that investment, and it needs to be measured in two fronts:

    1. ROI, which is the pure quantitative and financial analysis, often measured as productivity gains.
    2. My preferred approach is return on value (ROV), which is qualitative and focused on items such as customer loyalty, employee morale, better decision-making, and the ability to find information faster to increase customer responsiveness. Many of these things impact productivity and are therefore ROI, but they aren’t often measured and are therefore difficult to quantify. Isn’t the impact of finding the right knowledge to be able to do one’s job priceless? If we are smart about how we invest our time, money, and energy based on return on value, then we will naturally bring tremendous value to our customers and market and end up as a growing, profitable company that is resilient through the ups and downs of the economy and market.

And fifth is promoting a strong work/life balance. Work is important, but we cannot forget our families and shouldn’t compromise being with them due to office pressures.  For a long period of time I was a workaholic, but after my first son was born I committed to change. Over the years I have done my best to practice what I preach, successfully balancing work and family life, and I encourage our employees to do the same. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my incredible wife and our great boys.

These attributes are prevalent at BA Insight, and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead.  I am extremely confident that we are well positioned to enable the future of unified information access as we help visionary organizations around the world realize the value of the collective intelligence that is being captured every day within the massive volumes of content they produce.

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