Site search is very powerful function. We will describe it’s fundamentals today. You can use this function only, if your chatbot belongs to Business or Trial package.
What is Site search anyway?
It is intelligent website text search which uses two different but complementary approaches:
1. Advanced text search on website. It is usual text search with word forms and synonyms and is improved with advanced language technologies. Chatbot’s answer is one (or more) link to webpage(s).
2. Crammer technology. It is Cross-Language “Question Answering” system based on interlingua (in this case, developers employ interlingua from Amebis). Sentences from input knowledge are translated into interlingua, split into fragments and added to the database. To answer, the question is translated into interlingua and split into fragments, then the database is searched for appropriate facts. The answers are then translated from interlingua into natural language; they can be short (just a specific phrase) or long (in a sentence).
It is obviously that Crammer technology has some limitations. At the moment, its success rate is about 50%. The reasons are that some grammatical structures aren’t supported yet, analyzer can come across unknown words, disambiguation…
If visitor’s question don’t has an answer in patterns (and in predefined knowledge modules), than your chatbot answer with Site search.
Here are two examples (left with Advanced text search results, right with Crammer technology result):
Before your visitors can use Site search, your website needs to be analyzed and indexed. This might take several hours or even days – it depends on number of pages on your website and number of chatbots that waiting for the same thing on server.
You can track status of indexing next to where URL address has been entered.
Because indexing is repeated every two weeks, eventual changes on your website will be included automatically.
Indexation can take very long, so it is clear that you can use Site search only on your websites. You can enter http://www.wikipedia.org, but process won’t start.
This is checked with embed code which must be on your website. You can’t put embed code on Wikipedia (well there are some people who can :-)) and this is a good safety catch.
If your chatbot isn’t ready for deployment yet and you want to test Site search function before deployment, you can comment embed code. The SecondEGO engine checks only an API key on webpage source code.
Let’s write this again to be clear. If you want to use Site search function, follow next steps:
1. Insert embed code (could be commented) into your website.
2. Click the “Publish changes” button under the “Dashboard/Status” tab.
3. Check status next to used URL address to see when it is finished.
This topic is just a short description about Site search and its background. There are many things behind this technologies, but describing them can be too complex and probably out of our context.
In a nuts, Site search is very powerful and interesting feature. It can drastically quicken implementation of chatbot, because all the knowledge on your existing website will be easily available to chatbot.