ABC uses machine learning to improve results in revamped search

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is using machine learning to extract metadata from text, podcasts and other forms of media, making them easier to find via a new search engine. Machine learning engineer Gareth Seneque told the YOW! Data 2019 conference that the ABC moved out of beta in February this year with a new search engine based on technology from US startup Algolia (which also runs search for the likes of Twitch and Stripe). The search domain still sports beta labelling but is in full production use. "There are reasons for [the url] behind the scenes - stuff involving CMS migrations and the like that I won't detour into - but we're very much in the scaling up and out phase of things," Seneque said. But Seneque said user feedback on search was poor. "Specifically, content types were not supported, indexing speeds were slow stuff as the stuff would take a while to show up in the index, and the relevance of results was poor," he said.