Great article in this week’s Time magazine about a company called QlikTech and their QlikView product (August 3, page Global 4) This company makes business intelligence software that searches associatively, like our brains, instead of linearly like other search software. This makes search easier and faster, even for savvy researchers because you don’t have to figure out hierarchies before you can get the results you want, or wade through loads of results to find what you want, or fine tune your search terms.

From the article:

“Want to know what sales were on President’s day? Who sold the most? In states west of the Mississippi? Where the temperature was above 50º? Click, click, click, click. No computer would organize data this way, explains (company CEO Lars) Bjork, because most software was developed from hardware, meaning that it’s a slave to linear application. However, your brain doesn’t work like that.”

Right. Our brains work by conjuring up a question that is a formulation of what we want to know. Searching databases, data in enterprise systems, public data like census and employment data, etc. requires that you formulate a question that aligns with the hierarchy or organization of the data in order to find the answer inside that hierarchy. If you can search associatively, you don’t need to know anything about the organization of the data; all you need to know is what you want to know. The ability to do anything automated in an associative manner will feel more intuitive, and return more pertinent results. Smarter, faster, better. What more do you want!?

We executed an integrated marketing communications program for a client this year, for a research platform that promised these features. We weren’t privy to the technology behind the platform, but it look like it was a really good linear search algorithm, not associative. I wonder how many other associative search tools are being marketed for various customer applications.

I am anxious to check this out, and I am downloading a demo right now. Although they market this product as business intelligence software, I hope that it will permeate in to the public search sphere as well.

Image courtesy of Time Magazine