Lucidworks has been helping large organizations like Reddit with complex content build search tools that reach across massive content stores, but the company wanted to make the underlying search technology available to a wider market. Today, it released Lucidworks Site Search, a cloud service that enables companies to embed Lucidworks search in any application or website with a couple of lines of code.
It’s more of a pre-packaged solution, but it still takes advantage of the same natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning as its more complex and flexible cousin. It has been tuned specifically to engage the user in your site or application, and designed to provide a quick way to narrow their search based on factors you might know about them.
CEO Will Hayes says the company wanted to take the power of Fusion search and apply to it to applications, particularly around site search. “What we have done is turn this into SaaS service as a way to consume the Fusion data,” he said. “We have been building a smart data platform and search is how you engage and ranking and relevance is how you push the best user experiences,” he added.
The approach is to make it as simple as possible to insert Lucidworks search into an application or website simply by adding a couple of lines of javascript and then connecting some data. As soon as the data sources are configured, it’s basically ready to go, he said.
The underlying artificial intelligence also monitors what it knows about the visitor to help customize the content that it surfaces for that person. “Better data experience is low hanging fruit in terms of uplift. You can always enhance that experience by providing better data. Let us crawl your content, and look at web logs and user behavior and we will start displaying better content for your users.”
In terms of privacy especially in light of the upcoming GDPR regulations in the EU, Hayes says his company has been working with enterprise companies for some time, who have needed to do things like isolate personally identifiable information (PII) and enforce policies around geography, so they are ready for that as anyone.
Hayes says this just the first of many tools it plans to roll out in the future built on top of the Lucidworks platform.
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