Intranet Search Engine and AI
Back in the days when the concept of the intranet was introduced to the corporate world, it impressed companies as a grand infrastructure that enabled colleagues in the workplace to collaborate easily and work better. Indeed it was, no doubt!
But if you happen to interview the employees who used the early versions of the intranets in their companies, they are likely to unanimously agree that the usability of the intranet platform was anything but friendly. This is true because the intranet as it were, lacked some essential features that would make for a great user experience.
Fast forward to the modern intranet that is powered by modern tools full of features that make the intranet a breeze to use. Now, imagine what you can get when you add a good mix of AI.
One key element of an intranet that can be transformed to great heights by Artificial Intelligence is the intranet search engine. With AI, there is so much to be unleashed by the good old intranet, which is practically the organization’s version of the “internet”. It is here that employees and stakeholders come to look for internal company information of different types for various purposes related to their work.
Welcome to the era of Intranet Search Engine, powered by Artificial Intelligence.
Also Read: AI Driven Knowledge Base and How to Harness Enterprise Search to Enhance Knowledge Management
Intranet Search Engine: What is it?
The answer to the question “What is an intranet search engine” starts by understanding what an intranet is.
An intranet is a private internet network that is only accessible to authorized people within the company. It’s used for information sharing, communication, and collaboration on tasks.
The intranet is designed to serve the people who work in the company. Here, they can find company documents, templates, news, and all the important items they need to get their job going.
Based on this, it’s easy to understand that an intranet search engine is a tool that is designed for the purpose of helping users to find information from the company’s intranet.
Just like we use a search engine like Google to find information from the wider global public internet by typing the item you want in the search bar, users of an intranet search engine also type what they want in the search bar of their intranet search engine.
The key advantage of an intranet search engine is that it makes it easy to find information that is spread across the company. Instead of searching for information manually in folders or pages of voluminous documents, or in different apps, the intranet search engine automates the process to save time and resources.
Intranet vs Extranet vs enterprise net vs internet
The intranet is designed to serve employees, enabling them to find routine information, communicate and collaborate efficiently with their colleagues.
An extranet is like an extension of the intranet. It goes beyond the use of employees to include close associations of the company such as partners and vendors. The access by external parties is normally limited, meaning they may not have the same level of access as internal employees.
An enterprise net is an intranet that is much more comprehensive in terms of the information it has and the tools that it accommodates. It normally includes tools such as enterprise resource planning and HR systems. Think of it as a combination of the intranet and extranet.
The internet is the global network of interconnected devices, computers and servers, accessible to the global public and searchable by the giant search engines like Google and Bing.
Limitations of the traditional intranet search engine
While the concept of the intranet search engine is quite inspiring, the traditional one has done its bit but cannot live to expectations of the modern worker.
The mother of all limitations is the fact that employees are already used to the swift search experiences they encounter with tools like public search engines such as Google, or the search experiences they enjoy when buying stuff from eCommerce platforms like Amazon.
The search experience in these platforms is smooth, and the good thing is that it keeps improving.
This is the level of seamlessness that employees expect when they come to use the company’s intranet. But lo and behold, what they encounter with the intranet is way short of these expectations.
It’s difficult to drill down to the right information. For example, the company could have so many versions of leave forms. But there is that one version that is most recent and that is the right one that the HR people expect their colleagues to use when preparing to go for a leave. But finding the most recent version from the mountain of tens or hundreds of versions can be a challenge for traditional intranets. This can inconvenience both the employees looking for the right version and the HR department who have to keep on directing the ‘lost’ employees that they need to use the most recent form.
No wonder employees in most companies have been found to spend at least about 19% of their working time trying to find the correct information, according to a study by McKinsey. The same study also found that connectedness can improve employee productivity by at least 25%.
So, what bedevils the traditional intranet search engine to the extent that it fails to meet user expectations and match what employees already experience with the internet search engines?
These are the prominent contributing factors that lead to the frustrations:
1. Massive quantities of documents
As usual, companies have so many documents that contain huge amounts of information.
All these documents are dumped into the intranet in an incoherent manner – if we can put it that way. Employees are then expected to search for the information or document they need from this heap. The search tools at their disposal do not make their work any easier. They are ever sifting through layers and layers of material, some of it totally irrelevant.
In the end, the act of looking for information turns out to be another form of work. Anyone would find this unpleasant.
2. Obsolete information
Can you imagine, for example, pricing information that is from 5 years back, kept in a folder named “Current Prices”. Now think of that employee who comes to this folder, gets hold of the pricing information from this folder and uses it to serve customers or prepare some reports.
Of course, their supervisor may notice that the pricing information the poor employee used is out of date and point them to the right information. Unfortunately by this time, the employee will have wasted all that time they used to work with the wrong information.
Many intranets are filled with information that is out of date. The consequence of this is that a lot of time is wasted as the wrong information is used in important work. Worst of all, this scenario can lead to conflicts and misunderstanding especially between junior employees and their line managers.
3. Poor tagging
Tagging is a fundamental pillar when it comes to organizing information for easier search. But it’s poorly done in traditional intranets search engines because the tools at the disposal of those who create the information are simply incapable of enabling proper tagging.
Because of poor tagging, documents are kept in an inconsistent way and this makes it difficult to find a specific item. For example if reports are kept in a folder without tagging them with the right meta data for example the authors and versions, the work of finding a specific report becomes annoyingly complex.
4. The search tool is old school
This is a huge one. Huge because no matter how great and up- to-date the information is, users will still experience difficulties finding the right information if the search tool is slow, unable to search with relevance, lacks reference features, and so on.
5. Lack of intuitive capabilities
As much as we may think that searching is a simple thing to perform by just typing a keyword into a search bar and clicking ENTER, the reality is that searching sometimes needs expert search skills. In most cases, these skills come naturally while some can be earned.
Unfortunately, most employees are naturally not endowed with natural search skills. Their search literacy levels are low, and when this weakness meets the weakness of the intranet’s lack of intuitiveness, the employees’ search experience gets horrible.
Also Read: How to Overcome the Challenges in AI Adoption
Intranet Search Engine and AI: The Solution
Artificial Intelligence has enabled companies to solve the intranet search engine challenges that we have discussed.
AI brings speed, personalization and intuition among other powerful capabilities, to the intranet search engine.
Your intranet most likely has search functionality. But we can bet that employees are already complaining that the search function is so frustrating and does not offer much.
It could be delivering irrelevant results, very slow, and generally boring to use.
So, how does AI transform the intranet search engine to an appealing tool that everyone in the company would love to use?
Simply put, an AI-powered intranet search engine transforms the search function into an intelligent intranet search engine. For example, it can predict what an employee wants to find and can even ‘think’ with the employee, offering suggestions and providing context for every search result delivered.
Also Read: How Intelligent Enterprise Search Can Unlock the Huge Huge Potential of Your Company
The super features that AI brings to an intranet search engine include
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- Smooth and comprehensive indexing of data from multiple sources and harmonizing it in a way that is relevant in the eyes of the user, regardless of where the information comes from
- Intuitive search interface that employees will find so easy to use, and actually love to use it.
- Ability to retrieve information from other tools that the company uses, such as Salesforce, Excel, or Google Sheets
- Ability to surface results instantly so that employees don’t have to wait for long before they get results after they type and press ENTER
- Customizable according to the needs of different employees or departments. Most employees would love to use tools that can personalize their experiences.
- Leverages natural language processing to offer predictions and suggestions. This enables employees to get information that is beyond what they thought is all they needed.
- Correction features to help users make corrections as they search. Even better, AI can understand the intent of the user even when they mistype their search queries.
- In-built analytical features which responsibly collect and automatically study data to unearth valuable insights that can aid in decision-making. These insights can also help to create new materials to replace old ones or fill the void when some materials are not available.
AI is able to deliver all the above by unlocking the following capabilities:
| Predictive Search | Before one finishes typing what they want to search, the search engine suggests the full query. For example if one is searching for “Quarter 3 financials”, the search engine will suggest this full query the moment the user types the word “Quarter” or “Q3” to the search bar. |
| Semantic Search | Delivers more accurate and relevant results by leveraging the meaning of search queries. This is also responsible for correcting errors and typos during search. |
| Contextual Search | Leverages the user’s search history to personalize search results |
| One Search Interface | AI makes it possible to abandon the old practice of having to move from one tool to another in search of information. For example, an employee may want a certain piece of information from Slack and the only way they had to get it with traditional search is by going to Slack and searching it there. But with AI powered intranet search, employees can get information from any tool through a single search interface. |
| Secure Search | Access control features, encryption features, anonymization capabilities, compliance and audit support |
Tricension AI Powered Intranet Search Engine Solutions: Designed for the Modern Worker!
Tricension develops AI powered company intranet search engine solutions that transform search experience for employees and save companies enormous amounts of time that employees would have wasted trying to get the right information.
We take employee productivity seriously because we understand that poor productivity is a recipe for chaos that has killed many companies.
Since you already have the information, you lose nothing by giving your employees an intranet search engine that is precisely built to save their time. After all, it’s the company that benefits the most. Your employees will get to do more since they can find information fast. Their motivation levels will increase since they are no longer frustrated with inefficient intranet search experiences. They will no longer waste time scrolling endless data or changing from one application to another.
Learn more about AI-Driven Enterprise Search Development
Conclusion
While open-source intranet search engine solutions like Microsoft SharePoint and Apache Solr can serve some companies reasonably well, open source may not be the best option for a company that wants to get customized experiences that mirror their information environment.
Your employees deserve a customized modern intranet search engine that is designed to meet and grow with the company’s search needs. With AI, we make it even more powerful.
