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Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 1 of 59)

Research, analysis, and news about enterprise search and search markets, technologies, practices, and strategies, such as semantic search, intranet collaboration and workplace, ecommerce and other applications.

Before we consolidated our blogs, industry veteran Lynda Moulton authored our popular enterprise search blog. This category includes all her posts and other enterprise search news and analysis. Lynda’s loyal readers can find all of Lynda’s posts collected here.

For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.

Couchbase expands cloud database platform with Capella Columnar and vector search

September 3, 2024 /

Couchbase, Inc. launched Capella Columnar on AWS, to help organizations streamline the development of adaptive applications by enabling real-time data analysis alongside operational workloads within a single database platform. Also generally available today is Couchbase Mobile with vector search, which makes it possible for customers to offer similarity and hybrid search in their applications on mobile and at the edge, and Capella Free Tier, a free developer environment.

Capella Columnar addresses the challenge of parsing, transforming and persisting JSON data into an analysis-ready columnar format. It supports real-time, multisource ingestion of data from Couchbase, and systems like Confluent Cloud to draw data from third-party JSON or SQL systems. Capella Columnar makes analysis easy by using Capella iQ, an AI coding assistant that writes SQL++ so the developer doesn’t need to wait for the BI team to run analytics for them. Once an important metric is calculated, it can be written back to the operational side of Capella, which can use the metric within the application.

Using vector search on-device with Couchbase Lite, the embedded database for mobile and IoT applications, mobile developers can now leverage vector search at the edge for building semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.

https://www.couchbase.com/blog/free-tier-capella-columnar-mobile-vector-search-and-more/

Elastic returns to open source license for Elasticsearch and Kibana

August 29, 2024 /

Elastic, a Search AI Company, announced that it is adding the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL) as an option for users to license the free part of the Elasticsearch and Kibana source code that is available under Server Side Public License 1.0 (SSPL 1.0) and Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2).

With the addition of AGPL, an open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Elasticsearch and Kibana will be officially considered open source and enable Elastic’s customers and community to use, modify, redistribute, and collaborate on Elastic’s source code under a well-known open source license.

Adding AGPL will also enable greater engagement and adoption across our users in areas including vector search, further increasing the popularity of Elasticsearch as a runtime platform for RAG and building GenAI applications.

The addition of AGPL as a license option does not affect existing users working with either SSPL or ELv2, and there will be no change to Elastic’s binary distributions. Similarly, for users building applications or using plugins on Elasticsearch or Kibana, nothing changes — Elastic’s client libraries will continue to be licensed under Apache 2.0.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

Microsoft introduces Bing generative search

July 24, 2024 /

From The Microsoft Bing Blog…

… Today, we’re excited to share an early view of our new generative search experience which is currently shipping to a small percentage of user queries …

This new experience combines the foundation of Bing’s search results with the power of large and small language models (LLMs and SLMs). It understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content, and generates search results in a new AI-generated layout to fulfill the intent of the user’s query more effectively.

We’ve refined our methods to optimize accuracy in Bing, applying those insights as we continue to evolve our use of LLMs in search. We are continuing to look closely at how generative search impacts traffic to publishers. Early data indicates that this experience maintains the number of clicks to websites and supports a healthy web ecosystem. The generative search experience is designed with this in mind, including retaining traditional search results and increasing the number of clickable links, like the references in the results. 

We are slowly rolling this out and will take our time, garner feedback, test and learn, and work to create a great experience before making this more broadly available.

https://blogs.bing.com/search/July-2024/generativesearch

Elastic introduces Playground to accelerate RAG development with Elasticsearch

June 28, 2024 /

Elastic announced Playground, a low-code interface that enables developers to build RAG applications using Elasticsearch in minutes.

While prototyping conversational search, the ability to rapidly iterate on and experiment with key components of a RAG workflow (for example: hybrid search, or adding reranking) are important— to get  accurate and hallucination-free responses from LLMs.

Elasticsearch vector database and the Search AI platform provides developers with a wide range of capabilities such as comprehensive hybrid search, and to use innovation from a growing list of LLM providers. Our approach in our playground experience allows you to use the power of those features, without added complexity.

Playground’s intuitive interface allows you to A/B test different LLMs from model providers (like OpenAI and Anthropic) and refine your retrieval mechanism, to ground answers with your own data indexed into one or more Elasticsearch indices. The playground experience can leverage transformer models directly in Elasticsearch, but is also amplified with the Elasticsearch Open Inference API which integrates with a growing list of inference providers including Cohere and Azure AI Studio.

https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/rag-playground-introduction

Franz announces AllegroGraph 8.2

June 27, 2024 /

Franz Inc., a supplier of Graph Database technology for Entity-Event Knowledge Graph Solutions, announced AllegroGraph 8.2, a Neuro-Symbolic AI Platform, with enhancements to ChatStream offering users a natural language query interface that provides more accurate and contextually relevant responses. ChatStream’s Graph RAG with Feedback enables more accurate, context-aware, and continuously evolving natural language queries, providing stateful and contextually relevant responses. Additional updates include:

Knowledge Graph-as-a-Service – A new hosted, free version grants users access to AllegroGraph with LLMagic via a web login.

Enhanced Scalability and Performance – AllegroGraph includes enhanced FedShard capabilities making the management of sharding more straightforward and user-friendly, reducing query response time and improving system performance.

New Web Interface – AllegroGraph includes a redesign of its web interface, AGWebView, that provides an intuitive way to interact with the platform, while co-existing with the Classic View.

Advanced Knowledge Graph Visualization – A new version of Franz’s graph visualization software, Gruff v9, is integrated into AllegroGraph. Gruff now includes the ChatStream Natural Language Query feature as a new means to query your Knowledge Graph and is a visualization tool that illustrates RDF-Star (RDF*) annotations, enabling users to add descriptions to edges in a graph – such as scores, weights, temporal aspects and provenance.

https://franz.com

Snowflake announces enhancements to Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake ML, and more

June 4, 2024 /

Snowflake announced new innovations and enhancements to Snowflake Cortex AI to unlock the next wave of enterprise AI for customers to create AI-powered applications. This includes new chat experiences, which help organizations develop chatbots so they can talk directly to their enterprise data and get the answers they need faster. In addition, Snowflake is democratizing how any user can customize AI for specific industry use cases through a new no-code interactive interface, access to large language models (LLMs), and serverless fine-tunings. Snowflake is also accelerating the path for operationalizing models with an integrated experience for machine learning (ML) through Snowflake ML, enabling developers to build, discover, and govern models and features across the ML lifecycle. Snowflake’s unified platform for generative AI and ML allows every part of the business to extract value from their data.

Snowflake is unveiling two new chat capabilities, Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Snowflake Cortex Search, allowing users to develop these chatbots in a matter of minutes against structured and unstructured data, without operational complexity. Cortex Analyst, built with Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral Large models, allows businesses to build applications on top of their analytical data in Snowflake. Other announced enhancements include Snowflake Copilot, Cortex Guard, Document AI, and Hybrid Tables.

https://www.snowflake.com/news/snowflake-brings-industry-leading-enterprise-ai-to-even-more-users-with-new-advancements-to-snowflake-cortex-ai-and-snowflake-ml

Ontotext announces Metadata Studio 3.8

June 3, 2024 /

Ontotext, a provider of enterprise knowledge graph and semantic database engines, announced the latest version of Ontotext Metadata Studio (OMDS), a tool designed for knowledge graph enrichment through text analytics of unstructured documents. Version 3.8 aids in the creation, evaluation, and quality improvement of text analytics services. With more intuitive and effective search solution capabilities, enhancement to OMDS removes the difficulties users face when exposing semantic search over their documents, especially when they are working with their own, custom reference domain models. Updates include:

  • Enhanced Domain Model Search Interface transforms the reference annotation schema into a user-friendly search interface, allowing exploration and retrieval of content based on the preferred domain data model.
  • Knowledge Graph Enrichment and Extension enables users to reuse their domain models so they can be leveraged for advanced analytics and quality management.
  • Advanced Search Capabilities supports all types of searches. The solution allows users to conduct simple searches such as identifying documents containing specific text as well as complex queries that filter documents based on the presence or absence of certain text and combinations of metadata objects and property values.
  • Improved Usability and Workflow Efficiency enables users to organize content effortlessly by moving documents between corpora or deleting them from the database.

https://www.ontotext.com/products/ontotext-metadata-studio/

Perplexity introduces Perplexity Pages

May 30, 2024 /

Snippets from the Perplexity blog…

You’ve used Perplexity to search for answers, explore new topics, and expand your knowledge. Now, it’s time to share what you learned. Meet Perplexity Pages, your new tool for easily transforming research into visually stunning, comprehensive content. Whether you’re crafting in-depth articles, detailed reports, or informative guides, Pages streamlines the process so you can focus on sharing your knowledge with the world.

Pages lets you effortlessly create, organize, and share information. Search any topic, and instantly receive a well-structured, beautifully formatted article. Publish your work to our growing library of user-generated content and share it directly with your audience with a single click. What sets Perplexity Pages apart?

  • Customizable: Tailor the tone of your Page to resonate with your target audience, whether you’re writing for general readers or subject matter experts.
  • Adaptable: Easily modify the structure of your article—add, rearrange, or remove sections to best suit your material and engage your readers.
  • Visual: Elevate your articles with visuals generated by Pages, uploaded from your personal collection, or sourced online.

Pages is rolling out to users now. Log in to your Perplexity account and select “Create a Page” in the library tab.

https://www.perplexity.ai/page/new

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