Searching content is difficult if you are making sense of that content. The distinction between searching and sensible searching is important. If you are just searching it is a serious, complex problem when you’re talking about gigabytes of content. But when you’re talking about the search process having a clue about what is being searched for, you’re asking for a completely different level of sophistication.

By way of example, if I want to interrogate incoming e-mail messages to identify those that are sales-related from those that are support-related, then the value of that search will be directly related to how well the search engine can distinguish between text the intent of that text.

For example, “I bought X when will it arrive” and “I bought X how do I use it when it arrives” have completely different intents. A search engine without an understanding of grammar and syntax will not make a distinction without using extremely complex search terms that effectively implement intent-based analysis.

A company with a fascinating product that addresses this area of business process is InQuira. In particular, InQuira’s Intelligent Search takes an interesting approach to meeting customer search requirements.

According to the company’s Web site, Intelligent Search “provides out-of-the-box understanding and analysis of language, both to determine the meaning and usage of content and to derive User Intent. When content or user input is processed through the Semantic Processing Engine, a series of sophisticated linguistic and statistical techniques are applied, each of which builds on previous steps to add to the complete understanding of the content or question currently being evaluated.”

This is a very sophisticated approach to a very complex problem, and the scale of the product reflects it. As the Web site states, “with over 100,000 pre-defined concepts and relationships out of the box, InQuira's Semantic Processing Engine Ontologies represent a detailed understanding of both generally applicable and Domain-specific ideas,” provide a GUI-based environment to extend the semantic knowledge of the user search contexts and can “dynamically accept input from third-party repositories such as CRM systems.”

The core InQuira engine underlies the company’s product range, which includes Personalized Response and Personalized Navigation, Analytics, Contact Center Advisor, Information Manager, and Automated Email and Chat Resolution.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.