In last week’s article, What is Machine Learning?, I gave an overview of Machine Learning and provided a link to a very informative visual guide that describes how the technology works.  I also hinted at some useful applications within Enterprise Search.  I would like to cover a few of those that I have seen in recent months.

Query Analysis with Clustering

There are often many ways to search for the same concept or idea.  When we are reviewing search logs and trying to draw conclusions from what people are searching for, slight variations from query to query can make it difficult to do a comprehensive analysis.  For example, we recently worked with a major airline and one of their top queries was “bereavement fares”, i.e. people looking for discounted fares when attending a sudden funeral.  We knew that this particular query was popular, and that it needed some tuning to best serve the customers, but further analysis reveled other similar but different queries suffering from the same problem.  The other forms of the query were less common, and if treated individually, they would have flown under the radar (no pun intended) in our analysis.