Amazon releases Kendra to solve enterprise search with AI and machine learning

Enterprise search has always been a tough nut to crack. The Holy Grail has always been to operate like Google, but in-house. You enter a few keywords and you get back that nearly perfect response at the top of the list of the results. The irony of trying to do search locally has been a lack of content.

While Google has the universe of the World Wide Web to work with, enterprises have a much narrower set of responses. It would be easy to think that should make it easier to find the ideal response, but the fact is that it’s the opposite. The more data you have, the more likely you’ll find the correct document.

Amazon is trying to change the enterprise search game by putting it into a more modern machine learning-driven context to use today’s technology to help you find that perfect response just as you typically do on the web.

Today the company announced the general availability of Amazon Kendra, its cloud enterprise search product that the company announced last year at AWS re:Invent. It uses natural language processing to allow the user to simply ask a question, then searches across the repositories connected to the search engine to find a precise answer.

“Amazon Kendra reinvents enterprise search by allowing end-users to search across multiple silos of data using real questions (not just keywords) and leverages machine learning models under the hood to understand the content of documents and the relationships between them to deliver the precise answers they seek (instead of a random list of links),” the company described the new service in a statement.

AWS has tuned the search engine for specific industries including IT, healthcare and insurance. It promises energy, industrial, financial services, legal, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality, human resources, news, telecommunications, mining, food and beverage and automotive will be coming later this year.

This means any company in one of those industries should have a head start when it comes to searching because the system will understand the language specific to those verticals. You can drop your Kendra search box into an application or a website, and it has features like type ahead you would expect in a tool like this.

Enterprise search has been around for a long time, but perhaps by bringing AI and machine learning to bear on it, we can finally solve it once and for all.