I was just reading an
article in Businessweek Online that discussed a new search engine architecture that uses user input to filter results. As describe in the piece, this strategy could be summarized as mathematical search plus community filter. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was planning to use this strategy in his new search engine venture Wikiasari.
Last week I had an interesting discussion about the same concept with Coginizant’s CKO Sukumar. Sukumar is trying to implement a similar architecture for Cognizant’s knowledge management system. His objectives are to get higher participation rates from employees and placing reasonable demands on an expert’s time while maintaining the quality of responses. Under this regime, for questions that don’t require deep expertise, answers could come from anyone. In instances where specialized knowledge is required, the expectation is that an expert would respond. As the repository of responses grows, knowledge seekers can find most answers using mathematical search and tap into the expert community as and when needed.