Enterprise Search and Machine Learning: A Match Whose Time Has Come

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence and machine learning have increasingly come up in conversations about enterprise search. As artificial intelligence (AI) and its cousin, machine learning (ML), increased in accuracy and ease of integration, instances of them being directly integrated with or running alongside of search to improve results increased as well. But chances are you remember when search relevancy was based on simple metrics like term frequency -- the document with the largest number of instances was ranked highest, and documents with fewer instances ranked lower. You were able to provide stop words like "the" and "of" whose frequent use typically added no value in retrieving relevant documents. The only content really useful to the search engine was the terms in the user query.