Alation Releases New Version of its Enterprise Search Platform
June 3, 2021
Alation announces the latest release of its platform in its post, “How 2021.2 Is Remaking the Future of Enterprise Search.” This version comes with some handy features, like its table view, metadata search, and lexicon pairing. The post contains helpful screenshots. It is the tool’s boosted search ranking system, though, that writer Linh Nguyen puts at the top of the list. The platform’s AI now considers user input in establishing each resource’s worth. She tells us:
“Search results ranking and relevance now takes clues from social indicators. Alation catalog users have always been able to endorse or deprecate a given asset or dataset, signaling to their peers, ‘this asset is trustworthy’ or, by contrast, ‘warning! Use at your own risk! This asset is deprecated.’ With this update, we’re leveraging that tribal knowledge to influence all search rankings, illuminating the best assets that people trust. Specifically, user-created endorsements will boost ranking scores while deprecations will penalize rankings scores. Admins also have the option to customize the score associated with these trust flags (endorsements & deprecations). This empowers admins to effectively ‘endorse the endorsements’, further influencing rankings to promote the best assets to the right people.”
This sounds helpful, but we wonder whether it means content that is difficult to index will become even more difficult to find. What about audio, video, and comments in Slack, Teams, or Zoom; chemical structure and engineering diagrams; legal information within secured repositories; the PowerPoint data on sales professionals’ laptops? Improved UI and other nice-to-haves are well and good, but in our view comprehensive enterprise search remains elusive. Even with the power of AI.
Cynthia Murrell, June 3, 2021
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