Concept Search

Profiles: Project Creator, Search User

This page explains Concept Search, a Squirro feature that provides a means of searching without inputting an exact keyword query.

Concept search comes preconfigured out of the box, though project creators will need to ensure that the Global Search dashboard is configured correctly.

For search users, the feature is available within any Squirro document.

Introduction

Concept search is a technology where a search engine can return documents matching a defined concept (see Wikipedia’s article on Concept Search for further background).

In standard full-text search, some sort of boolean search is used to return relevant documents. You can enter a query such as technology company to find any document that matches both technology and company. In concept search, this would be defined as a concept, where the system is taught to understand what “technology company” means.

It will then take into account additional terms around this area and search for those as well - for example the technology company concept may potentially include terms such as IT or Silicon Valley.

As a result, the search engine can return more and better results for this concept.

Contextual Concept Search

Contextual concept search is exposed to end users in the form of a search icon when making a selection.

When clicking on that search, a concept search is executed returning documents that match the key aspects of the selected text.

Whenever content is selected, this shows a search icon around the selected text.

When clicking that button, the selection is used as search input to create a concept search.

Query results are returned that conceptually match the selected text, without all of the words having to appear in the returned documents.

To clearly show the difference, this is shown to the user as a separate text bubble in the search bar.

Tip: When hovering over the bubble, a tool-tip shows an extract of the text used for the concept search.

Limitations

The contextual concept search functionality depends on a Global Search dashboard existing and will display the results using that dashboard.

Reference: Learn more about Global Search Dashboard.