It takes thoughtful engineering to make your data accessible to users, and no matter how well organized it is, there will always be room for improvement

Managing a website is time-consuming when you’re constantly replying to support requests from people struggling to find what they’re looking for. It takes thoughtful engineering to make your data accessible to users, and no matter how well organized it is, there will always be room for improvement.

What if machine learning – the engine that drives successful AI – could improve this area of user experience tenfold?

It can, and here’s how:

Cognitive search automates the process of refining results

Your web developer has invested a lot of time and effort to make your pages visible in the search engines through SEO, but what happens when a visitor lands on a page and wants to refine what they’re searching for?

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Once the search engine’s technology brings a visitor to your website, they’ll be relying on your website’s native search technology to go further.

Basic search requires too much effort

Let’s say a business sells digital cameras and accessories like lenses, memory cards, and batteries. By using the basic search function built into the website’s platform (like Joomla or WordPress), when a user searches for “memory cards,” they’ll get a list of available memory cards.

That list could be twenty pages long. If they don’t find what they want quickly, many users will give up their search after the first few pages.

Users also have the option to sort results based on specific criteria. The dilemma is that it’s time-consuming for the user to manually narrow down their search results when cognitive search can do it automatically.

Cognitive search does more than just sort results

One company making headway in this field of technology is Coveo. Recently named a leader in cognitive search in the Forrester Wave report, Coveo’s search technology goes far beyond keyword identification. By analyzing background data and applying term detection technology, relevant results are provided, even when the user doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

Margaret Wise, the Vice President of Strategy for Coveo partner ARKE, told PRweb, “Our clients like the way Coveo automatically pulls and surfaces relevant content for respective topics in their content channels, or recommends the most relevant content based on factors they select, such as recency or topic. This is important because it gives users greater abilities to query and find the most relevant information for their needs, quickly and efficiently.”

Coveo’s top-ranked technology has been used by Adobe and Salesforce to improve self-service product support, and Logitech has recently used it to improve its case deflection rate by 30 percent.

Cognitive search thinks for your visitors

By utilizing some of the same technology used in the marketing strategy known as retargeting, cognitive search eliminates the struggle users experience trying to refine search results to meet their needs.

For example, when a user searches for “memory cards” on a digital camera website using this technology, they’ll receive a personalized list of results based on their past browsing history. If they’ve recently viewed a specific model of digital camera on Amazon, the memory cards compatible with that model will show up first.

With cognitive search technology, users don’t need to sort their results in multiple ways or get creative with their search terms in order to find what they need.

Cognitive search eliminates cumbersome tagging

To allow search results to be sorted by standard search functions, your products need to be tagged or assigned to the categories you’re enabling people to sort by. Since each product will undoubtedly receive multiple tags, that’s a lot of work.

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If your business doubles its content every few years like most do, keeping up with tagging your content will become impossible. The result is a website full of wonderful content, and no way for your visitors to easily access it.

Cognitive search uses machine learning to understand the subtleties of human language and can scan large amounts of content to make an educated guess about what the user needs – no tagging required.

Search is the backbone of the user experience

By improving the relevance of search results on your website, you eliminate many of the common support requests users send. Improved search also contributes to higher conversion rates and, ultimately, more sales.

Instead of trying to maintain a tagging system that only increases in complexity over time, consider implementing cognitive search technology to give yourself more time to focus on growing your business.

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The article How Cognitive Search Eliminates Common Struggles Website Users Face first appeared on Geektime.

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