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3 Reasons You Need AI-Powered Search in Your Content Library

Man walking down street beside colorful street art

When you hear “search engine”, what comes to mind?

For most, it’s Google, and for good reason. The data giant has invested heavily in AI and machine learning to become synonymous with connecting people with relevant information.

But you use all kinds of search engines on a daily basis. When you look for articles in your knowledge base, contacts in your CRM or shared assets in your DAM, you’re usually using search engines to do so. So what algorithms are your tools using to ensure you’re getting what you need? Are they up to par?

It’s often overlooked, but it’s important. You have to be able to find your best content to use it, which means your ability to deliver the best visuals to your audience is dependent on the power of your tools’ built-in search engines.

The days of the Dewey Decimal System are long gone. Here are three reasons you need AI to help you take the reins of your content library.

1| You’re not a thesaurus (Synonym detection)

Think of how many ways people refer to dogs in social captions…

Sometimes they say “dog”…

Sometimes they refer to the breed…

Husky Life.

A post shared by Abhinav A (@abh1nv) on

Sometimes they just use a related hashtag…

It’s so tiring being this cute 😙😴 #sleepypuppy #puppylove #goldenretriever #puppy

A post shared by Dallis king (@dallis.king) on

So if you’re putting together a blog post on your best local dog parks, how do you wrangle all those relevant photos?

Just searching “dog” will leave out a big chunk of useful content, but are you really going to try to string together every breed of dog you can think of in one giant search query? Probably not. Humans are imperfect – most of us don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of dog breeds.

That’s why CrowdRiff automatically searches for synonyms of the words you type. When you search for “dog”, CrowdRiff will scour your library for everything from “pooch” to “pug”. Synonym detection delivers better results faster so you can focus on making strong editorial choices and not searching for pictures of poodles.

2| You’re not always going to nail the phrasing (Stemming)

There are thousands of ways to express a single idea – it’s part of what makes language so great. It’s also a prime example of why you need AI to help you find content.

Consider the following captions:

“Brunching with my best friend from university!”
“Friends + Brunch = Heaven”
“Finishing off a week of killer brunches in the company of the friendly and talented @SusannahCR”

They all convey the same core message, but they’re phrased differently. If you’re looking for food photos, wouldn’t you expect all three to match a search for “friends having brunch”? You can’t be expected to know the exact phrasing of every photo and video tagged in a library of millions – it’s not realistic.

Stemming solves this problem by breaking words down to their roots and returning every logical variation. That means a search for “friend” will return content that references “friends”, “friendly” or “friendship”.

Our search engine gets to what you mean, even if it’s not exactly what you typed.

3| You need content on an ongoing basis (Predictive search)

Synonyms, stemming and image recognition are incredibly useful applications of AI technology. They provide immediate value every time you search.

But to maximize the value of this functionality, it needs to fit into your day; it needs to be repeatable.

That’s why we’ve built mechanisms to make use of past searches. In CrowdRiff, you can save searches and label them to preserve the searches that proved most effective. We also use predictive search to make real-time search suggestions based on recent activity.

With stemming and synonym detection in place, saved searches become more adaptive, more fluid. They’ll change when the synonyms do. They’ll consider the conjugations you missed. They’ll capture the essence of what you’re looking for so they always supply you with the most relevant content in your library.

Take command of your content library

CrowdRiff uses AI to connect you with your best visuals, so you can focus on delighting your audience.

Get in touch with us today to see CrowdRiff for yourself!

Header image taken by Talles Alves and shared on Unsplash