AI for Search

2023. Microsoft launches new Bing and Edge browser with ChatGPT



Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in an effort to better compete with Google. The company has announced its long-rumored integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine. As expected, the new Bing now features the option to start a chat in its toolbar, which then brings you to a ChatGPT-like conversational experience. Microsoft is also launching a new version of its Edge browser, with these new AI features built into the sidebar. With the new browser, web users are able to do things like summarize search results with AI’s help and converse with AI chatbots to get their questions answered, among other things.


2022. Meilisearch lands $15M investment to grow its ‘search-as-a-service’ business



Meilisearch, the creator behind the open source search engine project of the same name, today closed a $15 million Series A round. Unlike Elasticsearch, and other freely available search engine frameworks, Meilisearch is designed for frontend applications across a broad swath of domains — not just narrow use cases like e-commerce discovery. Leveraging natural language processing, Meilisearch attempts to gain a better understanding of the queries that users make on whatever app, service or website a developer builds it into. Meilisearch supports major languages and ships with search filters, like price and date, as well as customizable ranking rules. It also corrects for typos and mistakes, ensuring errors in queries don’t adversely impact the search experience.

2019. Salesforce brought AI power to its search tool


Salesforce announced Einstein Search - an AI-powered search tool for Salesforce users that is designed to point them to the exact information for which they are looking. For starters, it might not know the popularity of a given topic like Google, but it can learn the behaviors of an individual and deliver the right answer based on a person’s profile, including geography and past activity to deliver a more meaningful answer. Next, it allows you to enter natural language search phrasing to find the exact information you need, and the search tool understands and delivers the results. Finally, based on what the intelligence engine knows about you, and on your search parameters, it can predict the most likely actions you want to take and provide quick action buttons in the results to help you do that, reducing the time to action.


2019. Workplace AI assistant Capacity raised $13.2M


Capacity (former Jane.ai), the startup which is solving information scatter inside enterprises, has raised new cash to tackle the issue with its corporate data search platform. The company just closed a $13.2 million Series B. Capacity helps its customers pull all of their organizational data together into a platform that makes company information more accessible to people inside the company. It’s all done through a chat interface and directory that employees can use to search for information. There’s a pretty high degree of flexibility in customizing how questions are answered and when a line of questioning gets routed to a person onsite.


2019. Lucidworks raises $100M to expand in AI-powered search-as-a-service for organizations



A startup called Lucidworks, which has built an AI-based engine to help individual organizations provide personalised search services for their own users, has raised $100 million in funding. Lucidworks believes its approach can produce better and more relevant results than other search services in the market. Alongside that are companies that have been building search-as-a-service from the ground up — like Elastic, Sumo Logic and Splunk (whose founding team, coincidentally, went on to found Lucidworks…) — both for back-office processes as well as for services that are customer-facing.


2019. AlphaSense, a search engine for business, raised $50M


AlphaSense, which provides a way for companies to quickly amass market intelligence around specific trends, industries and more to help them make business decisions, has closed a $50 million round of funding, a Series B that it’s planning to use to continue enhancing its product and expanding to more verticals. One interesting aspect of AlphaSense is how it’s both focused on pulling in requests as well as set up to push information to its users based on previous search parameters. Currently these are set up to only provide information, but over time, there is a clear opportunity to build services to let the engines take on some of the actions based on that information, such as adjusting asking prices for sales and other transactions. The company counts some 1,000 clients on its books, with a heavy emphasis on investment banks and related financial services companies.


2017. Box applied AI to content management



Box has just unveiled Skills and the related SDK, Skills Kit. With these new offerings, organizations and developers now have the ability to pull insights from their massive content stores in Box data sets and apply machine learning to release the intrinsic commercial value in that content. Box is previewing three initial Box Skills, using machine learning tools from Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to solve common business use cases: Those use cases include: Image recognition (detecting individual objects and concepts in image files, capturing text through optical character recognition (OCR), and automatically adding keyword labels to images to easily build metadata on image catalogs), Audio Transcription & Analysis (uses audio files to create and index a text transcript that can be easily searched and manipulated in a variety of use cases), Video Indexing (analyzes video files to provide text transcription, topic detection and indexing, and facial recognition).