www.glean.com Open in urlscan Pro
34.253.101.190  Public Scan

Form analysis
2 forms found in the DOM

<form id="mktoForm_"></form>

Name: wf-form-Blog-post-form-3 — GET

<form id="wf-form-Blog-post-form-3" name="wf-form-Blog-post-form-3" data-name="Blog-post-form" method="get" aria-label="Blog-post-form">
  <div class="html-embed-5 w-embed"><input type="hidden" name="Article-Name" value="Enterprise search is hard: why it’s so behind—and what it’ll take to catch up">
    <input type="hidden" name="Report" value="">
  </div>
  <div id="w-node-_57bf15ea-8cb4-9b1a-b595-90e9419eb3e9-3eb6d5f6" class="forminternalwrap">
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="name" class="field-label">First name*</label><input type="text" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="name" data-name="Name" placeholder="First name" id="name" required=""></div>
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="Last-name" class="field-label">Last name*</label><input type="text" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="Last-name" data-name="Last name" placeholder="Last name" id="Last-name" required=""></div>
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="Company" class="field-label">Company*</label><input type="text" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="Company" data-name="Company*" placeholder="Company you work for" id="Company" required=""></div>
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="Job-title" class="field-label">Job title*</label><input type="text" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="Job-title" data-name="Job title" placeholder="Job title" id="Job-title" required=""></div>
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="Work-Email" class="field-label">Work email*</label><input type="email" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="Work-Email" data-name="Work Email" placeholder="Work email" id="Work-Email" required="">
    </div>
    <div class="ffwrap"><label for="Phone-number" class="field-label">Phone number*</label><input type="tel" class="text-field nobm w-input" maxlength="256" name="Phone-number" data-name="Phone number" placeholder="Phone number" id="Phone-number"
        required=""></div>
  </div>
  <div id="w-node-_94199bdb-4afb-087b-cfab-f7b8f0cca326-3eb6d5f6" class="buttonwrap fbw"><input type="submit" value="Submit" data-wait="Please wait..." class="cta-button w-button">
    <div class="fineprint">By clicking “Submit,” I acknowledge receipt of the Glean <a href="/privacy-policy">Privacy Policy</a>.</div>
  </div>
</form>

Text Content

Product
Features
Knowledge
Management
Work Hub
Connectors
Security
Solutions
Engineering
Sales
Support
People
Knowledge Management
BlogPricingAbout us
Product
Features
Knowledge Management
Work Hub
Connectors
Security
Solutions
All teamsEngineeringSalesSupportPeopleKnowledge Management
BlogPricingAbout us
Sign inSign in
Get a demo



ENTERPRISE SEARCH IS HARD: WHY IT’S SO BEHIND—AND WHAT IT’LL TAKE TO CATCH UP


Eddie Zhou

Engineering

Mrinal Mohit

Engineering



All too often, we take search for granted. 


Google works amazingly well—so much so that it’s painfully obvious where
enterprise search software has fallen behind. Trying to find something in our
day-to-day work just isn’t as seamless as trying to find something on the
Internet. 


Why is that? Simply put, enterprise search is hard. Each company’s content is
unique to that organization, unlike the shared web that billions of people
search daily. Within a company, employees are usually looking for specific,
unrepeated information, rather than the millions of pages on the web which might
answer the same question. And all this content is usually comprehensible only by
those working at the company, making it hard to learn from usage patterns and
feedback.


Given the complexity, enterprise search software has been years behind web
search for far too long. Here’s what it’ll take to catch enterprise search
software up to the current needs of companies today.



GET THE BASICS RIGHT

There’s a lot of functionality you’d expect the search feature in popular SaaS
(Software as a Service) tools to have, but most of the time, their native search
simply doesn’t work. That’s because they often miss out on some of the basics. 


Enterprise search software should search across all of your content, not just
document titles. It should come with knowledge of standard acronyms and
synonyms, automatically including results that mention “Chief Executive
Officer'' when you search for “CEO,” and results that mention “holiday calendar”
when you search for “vacation calendar.” It should also understand that
different parts of your search query are intended for different purposes; when
you search for “board meeting slides,'' it should know to surface the slides not
just because of what they contain, but what they are. 


Ranking algorithms should constantly learn from feedback. If you click on a
search result low down the list, it should understand that the result probably
should’ve been ranked higher, while being careful not to overfit to this one
data point (unlike with Google search, feedback signals here are much sparser
and less reliable). In the not infrequent moments when you slip up, it should
recognize and correct your typos, based on the language of your company.


All of this should exist in one unified interface across all apps, with no
manual tuning required, ready to go from Day 1.



UNDERSTAND YOUR COMPANY’S LANGUAGE

Typing in keywords and hoping for a match has been the dominant paradigm for
search. But often, that’s not enough. Sometimes you might remember what a
document talked about, but not how it was worded. Enterprise search software
should come with built-in semantic search, so you can look for information the
way you remembered it—even if you replace “what’s the wifi password” with “where
are the internet settings.”


Of course, how you communicate within your company could differ very wildly from
other companies. Depending on if you build software or grow fruit, “apple” could
refer to a few different concepts. An effective enterprise search system needs
custom deep learning models to help it understand your company’s specific
language. These models not only drive semantic search, but also learn what words
you and your colleagues use as synonyms—whether it's that project that got
renamed, or the clever acronym you created for it. The amount of data in a
company is usually many orders of magnitude smaller than the web or public
datasources, so robust domain adaptation on such low volume requires careful,
nuanced application of transfer learning.



UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR COMPANY WORKS

Your company is unique. Different teams work on different documents, talk about
varied projects, and use an assortment of software in their own idiosyncratic
ways. None of that is shared by other companies, yet understanding all of that
is critical to a search experience that just works. Constantly building a
knowledge graph of all the buzzing activity within your company enables search
to surface the most important, relevant and fresh content, for every query.
Graph learning techniques also enable an understanding of how all documents,
people, and concepts within the company relate to each other.


Aggregated data from various sources should provide a 360-degree view of all
your employees—who they are, what they work on, who they work closely with, and
what they’ve been up to. A similar view for customers should help teams track
leads and opportunities in one unified interface.



UNDERSTAND HOW YOU WORK

What you need to know to get work done is very different from what other people
in the company might need. A search for, say, “quarterly goals'' should take
into account if you’re a software engineer or a sales account executive, instead
of just showing the same results to everyone. Every search should be deeply
personalized, and the ranking algorithms should leverage an understanding of the
documents you work on, the tools you use, the projects you talk about, and the
region you work from. The knowledge graph must inform the search system which of
your coworkers’ content you care about the most, and use that to make sure every
search is tailored specifically for you. This understanding of each user should
be further used in the autocomplete feature when suggesting queries and
documents to quickly get you what you need.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

‍

Building a great search experience for the enterprise requires solving
previously unsurmounted challenges. It requires deeply understanding how you
work, and what information matters to you. At Glean, we tackle these problems
every day. And we’re excited to give teams the work assistant that catches
enterprise search up to where it should be.

Get a Demo


Published 
January 10, 2023
Last updated 
October 11, 2022
Published 
October 5, 2021
. Last updated 
October 11, 2022
. 


Read more from the Glean team


DOWNLOAD THE





 




Fill out the details below to get the full report delivered to your inbox.

By completing and submitting the form below, you will receive information and
promotions from Glean.

First name*
Last name*
Company*
Job title*
Work email*
Phone number*
By clicking “Submit,” I acknowledge receipt of the Glean Privacy Policy.
Please check your inbox for the report.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read more from the Glean team


RELATED ARTICLES

MEET GLEAN. THE WORK ASSISTANT WITH INTUITION.

Glean brings you exactly the information you need, right when you need it.
Making it easier for you and your team to get big things done.

Arvind Jain

CEO



ORGANIZING YOUR TEAM’S KNOWLEDGE WITH COLLECTIONS

Nearly seven months after launch, search remains at the core of Glean. But
there’s still an opportunity for curated collections of information.

Arvind Jain

CEO



WHY GLEAN’S ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE THE BEST WAY TO DO INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

It can be hard for everyone to stay abreast of important announcements. Here's
how Glean can help your company.

Blair Hanley Frank

Marketing



GLEAN PARTNERS WITH GOOGLE CLOUD TO DELIVER AND SCALE LEADING ENTERPRISE SEARCH

Glean is officially partnering with Google Cloud to deliver and scale the
leading enterprise search solution for the new era of digital work.

Glean





WHY I JOINED GLEAN – ENTERPRISE SEARCH, SOLVED

Glean is solving the most critical problem of today’s digital workplaces.
Discover why I chose to join Glean, and how it’s uniquely poised to
revolutionize enterprise knowledge management and discovery.





THE 2023 ONBOARDING SURVEY REPORT

Employees are shifting jobs more often than ever, and the volume of information
and tools we use has ballooned – but onboarding hasn't kept up to accommodate.
Discover in this new report how onboarding processes need to change to enable
workers to thrive in the modern workplace.

Glean






FIND WHAT YOU NEED—INSTANTLY.

Get a demo

Product

Features

Knowledge Management

Work Hub

Connectors

Security

Solutions

All teams

Engineering

Sales

Support

People

Knowledge Management

Resources

Blog

Help

Pricing

Plans

Company

About us

Careers

Press

© 2022, Glean Technologies, Inc.
PrivacySupport AgreementTerms

Eddie Zhou
Engineering
As part of the Applied Brain team at Google, Eddie was lucky enough to work on
large-scale models powering a broad range of products, from Web Search ranking
to Assistant NLU to YouTube and Ads recsys. In his spare time, he enjoys playing
basketball, watching his cat do weird stuff, and cracking open cold ones in the
California sunshine.
Mrinal Mohit
Engineering
Mrinal built voice assistants and NLP libraries at Facebook before hopping over
to Glean to work on search quality. When not waiting for his ML models to train,
he likes reading world history, traveling off the beaten track, and bringing
home photographs to frame. He’s tried living off mangoes, momos and mochi, and
is still alive.
Related Articles
Arvind Jain

CEO

Meet Glean. The work assistant with intuition.
Arvind Jain

CEO

Organizing your team’s knowledge with Collections
Blair Hanley Frank

Marketing

Why Glean’s announcements are the best way to do internal communications