Extract from Avansic’s article “Search and Ye Shall Find”
Given how deeply search is ingrained in our lives, there’s a good argument to teach search syntax instead of calculus. But just because you can find what you need on Google doesn’t mean it’s as easy in eDiscovery. The key differences come down to intent, the role of analytics, and the presentation of results – all discussed here.
As with many complex tasks, a refresher on the fundamentals is often in order. Let’s dig deeper into a few of those, as well as some of the underlying search technology used in eDiscovery.
Daily Life and eDiscovery Search Differences
In daily life, you often run searches that use algorithms and machine learning to get to the best answer. “What is the best action movie this year” isn’t so much a keyword search as it is a robust question posed to advanced analytics engines. The results are based on the training of those systems from other people who asked a similar or the same question and the results they clicked on afterward.
In eDiscovery, there is no such training – you’re running the search for the first time with a particular data set, and there’s no information for the computer to have learned from other users. There are some moves to apply learning from other cases, which would bring eDiscovery closer to the ubiquitous search you experience on the Internet.
