Thought Leaders in Big Data: Paul Nelson, Chief Architect at Search Technologies (Part 2)

Paul Nelson: Right now, we’re seeing an explosion of chatbots. We’re getting a lot of customers who are coming to us asking for semantic search. They want to do semantic search so that I can type in something like “red shirts” and I will find actual shirts in the color red or in colors similar to red. I could type something as complex as, “What is the status of order number 32?” It’ll actually tell me where that is.

I can ask questions like, “How do I back up my cellphone?” The software will understand what you’re trying to achieve and take you directly to the instructions for how to back up your cellphone. Those are interesting use cases that have a strong component of natural language processing. Not only are chatbots becoming super hot but also these other sorts of semantic search capabilities where you have natural language processing on top of search. That’s really interesting.

A second use case would be search accuracy. We have a lot of customers who say that their search results are not as good as they could be. It’s also important in e-commerce because search results are directly tied to revenue and return on investment. We’re actually using machine learning and then use machine learning to predict how likely a person will be to purchase a product based on the searches they’ve entered and their past history. The use of machine learning in those worlds is really interesting.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you compete with?

Paul Nelson: We’re a consultancy so there’s a lot of small search engine companies that maybe have 20 to 30 people, but I don’t think there’s any other search engine consultancy that’s as large as us or as focused as we are on search and Big Data.

Sramana Mitra: Are you working on proprietary technology or are you using other people’s technologies?

Paul Nelson: We use a lot of open source, but we also do have strong partnerships with Coveo, MarkLogic, and others. We still have a strong partnership with the Google search appliance, but that’s now end-of-life.

Sramana Mitra: You said you had a couple of hundred customers.

Paul Nelson: 900 customers. A couple of hundred employees.

Sramana Mitra: What are some problems that customers are highlighting for you for which there aren’t solutions out there yet for where you need vendors to create new technology?

Paul Nelson: There are two things that have come up that are really hot right now. One is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that’s recently been passed by the European Union. It goes into effect in May 2018. You need to identify all of the places in your company where a citizen of the European Union might be referenced – their name, email address, national ID numbers. GDPR also gives citizens the right to be forgotten, which means they can go to a company and say, “Please forget me.” You have to go through and find references to that person and scrub that person from all your databases.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Paul Nelson, Chief Architect at Search Technologies
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