Searching for a Better Search – Trey Grainger, Chief Algorithms Officer at Lucidworks – How Intelligent, Targeted Search Engines Can Provide Better, More Relevant Results for Employees and Customers
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trey Grainger, Chief Algorithms Officer at Lucidworks, author, and speaker, discusses search engines, artificial intelligence, and AI-powered searches.
Podcast Points:
- What can AI-powered searches do for me or my company?
- An overview of the technology behind AI-powered search engines.
- How employees can benefit from better search engines.
Grainger is an experienced engineering and data science executive with specific expertise in search and information retrieval, as well as recommendation systems, and data analytics spaces. Grainger discusses his background and his work at Lucidworks, the successful San Francisco, California-based enterprise search technology company.
As Grainger explains, Lucidworks provides its expertise in the area of AI-powered search technology to hundreds of Fortune 1000 clients. Accessing data and finding relevant results is the name of the game, and Lucidworks is exceptional in this critical area of business development. He discusses chatbots and analytics use cases, and how companies can benefit.
Lucidworks assists their broad base of clients by helping them build intelligent search applications that will allow them to fully expose their products to customers and/or provide internal knowledge to all their existing employees. Grainger goes on to explain how search engines are utilized by nearly every website, but many simply don't get the job done. Lucidworks powers search engine technology that digs deeper and provides relevant results that are useful.
Grainger talks about the importance of 'bringing back' results that best match the intent of the user/searcher. Intelligent search technology must be specific, focusing on the content dimension, and user-understanding dimension, etc. For example, sophisticated search engines should be able to pick up on signals, learning what people want to 'see' in their content, based upon their clicks and behaviors, so the engine can 'tune' itself to find better answers for future user/searchers.
He delves into the subject of domain understanding, and discusses how it drills down to what the content is really about. For the engine to understand the nuanced meaning of searches and search words is important. The context of the user is important, for example, if a user searches for the word 'driver' while at the airport, the search engine should be able to discern that they're probably looking for an Uber or taxi driver, and probably not a device driver for their computer's OS. Context is crucial in order to provide the appropriate results.
Continuing, Grainger discusses the specifics of queries, and different experiences that searches can provide. He talks about the direct correlation between improving relevance in searches to increased bottom lines. He talks about commerce use cases versus enterprise use cases, their similarities, and the benefits. Wrapping up, Grainger talks about natural language processing and the future of searches.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions. |
| 0:02.0 | Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. |
| 0:05.0 | How about advice from a real genius? |
| 0:07.0 | 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. |
| 0:11.0 | 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1% are real Jesus. |
| 0:18.0 | Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field, sleep science, |
| 0:25.7 | cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius |
| 0:32.1 | podcast that Richard Jacobs. This is the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | That is Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:35.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Fighting Genius podcast. |
| 0:41.0 | I have a good guest today, Trey Granger. He's the chief algorithms officer, I guess the |
| 0:46.1 | CAO or CAO, I don't know, at Lucid Works and they developed an AI powered search. |
| 0:53.4 | So we're gonna talk about what that means, |
| 0:55.3 | what that's about, and how it helps and how it works. |
| 0:57.8 | So Trey, thanks for coming. |
| 0:59.2 | How you doing quite well. |
| 1:00.8 | Thanks for having me, Richard. |
| 1:01.9 | Yeah, so what is the primary goal of Lucid Works? What's the company about? |
| 1:06.8 | Sure. So Lucid Works is a search company, an AI-powered search company. |
| 1:12.1 | You know, we've got... search company. |
| 1:13.0 | You know, we've got hundreds of customers across the Fortune 1000 and essentially we help them, you know, take their data and allow either customers or employees to access the data and find relevant results. |
| 1:28.8 | So that could be matching in terms of, you know, keyword search, that could be recommendation engines, maybe there's chat |
... |
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