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We’re excited to announce that our new and improved Search capability has now moved to General Availability as of 2.7.7. (this is referred to as Search 2 within our technical documentation). 

Let’s face it – the current Search experience came out with the first versions of the Quantexa Platform and needed a facelift. Although it did the job, and quite a good one at that, we received feedback from Quantexa users that gave us ideas on how to overhaul the functionality to both keep the UX consistent and to make it a lot more intuitive. Throughout this journey, we also found synergies in the Search setup process by coupling it up with our Data Fusion tool, and making Search a lot faster to set up.  

By the way, now you can explore our roadmap and give feedback on our features and functionality in our Product Roadmap & Ideas Portal! Be a part of our product development!

How we brought Entities front and center 

From user feedback, we realized that the way users interact with the Search functionality can be improved by bringing more power to search using what Quantexa already knows about entities thereby optimizing the Search query construction.  

To enable this the Query Building aspects of the Search UI have been redesigned to reframe the search experience around the Entities available in the Platform. This gives the user the power to tell the system what they are looking for (which Entity Type) and then the system offers the most appropriate Data Sources and Search Fields to find the Individual, Business or other Entity the user wishes to search for. Before, the search results could sometimes be not exactly what -the user expected due to incomplete or sub-optimal search configuration. This brings us to our next update – new configuration through Data Fusion! 

How we simplified Search configuration 

If you are a Quantexa user, you might be familiar with the Search configuration process which is separate from entity resolution and tuning. What we figured is, if our users are overwhelmingly looking for entities in their searches, why not streamline the search setup up by ‘inheriting’ the settings from Data Fusion, where all the magic happens with entities. To be specific, you no longer manually have to define the search fields and groups yourself as we derive them from Fusion config. So you not only save efforts in setting up a tool, but you also get far better results from reusing the configuration that’s been tuned and tested. 

We have also improved some existing features:  

• We have updated how our Results Filters work once the user has executed their query. It is now possible to filter using more than one item in the Filter list in the results screen.  
• Additionally, we have improved the Table View of results. 

How we made Search faster 

If you are using new Search with our Entity Store then you are able to perform very fast direct Entity Searches even across massive amounts of data. The Entity Store keeps a pre-built version of your resolved entities available at hand, but also updates as soon as there are any changes or new data is introduced, so you get the speed without compromising on the content. 

How we made de-bugging faster 

Lastly, it is worth noting that this new version of Search has both re-used existing components within the Platform and is much simpler to support and de-bug than the old version of Search. Together this reduces the overall support burden on Quantexa’s R&D department – you might be thinking this is more of Quantexa benefit, but actually it means we are able to handle support requests faster and free up engineers to work on other enhancements to the Platform. 

What has been removed? 

At a fundamental level the new version of Search (known as Search 2 in our technical documentation) has feature parity with the old version of Search (Search 1) plus the new features already explained. However, there are several feature removals that are worth noting: 

• As the Fusion configuration will now drive the search field mappings, there is no need to generate Search Fields anymore, thus we removed the feature altogether. 
• We have removed the support for field boosting as the feature was deemed not useful by our users  
• Facets have been replaced with Aggregations and can be easily migrated from the old Search to the new Search. 
• We have removed the type ahead on Search Fields in the Search Bar as the query-building experience has been re-designed and this feature is no longer necessary. 

Deprecation and Removal of the old version of Search  

• The old version of Search (Search 1) is deprecated at 2.8.0.  
• We expect to remove the old version of Search from the Platform at the earliest at 2.9.0. 
• All new customers are required to adopt the new version of Search from 2.7.7. onwards. 

View the New and Improved Search Demo

Head over to Product Demos and launch the New Search Demo (login required) for an interactive walk-through of the new features included:

How do I provide Feedback? 

We know this is not the end of the improvements necessary to our search capabilities, so expect to make further investments in the medium term. It would be valuable to hear feedback about the new Search results screen and the query editing experience. Please provide feedback directly to the Search initiative using the Product Roadmap & Ideas Portal.

Future roadmap 

For the next 12 months we will not be making major changes to introduce new capabilities to our Search functionality. Our focus will be ensuring that as our existing customers upgrade and adopt this new version of Search and that the experience of migrating from old Search to new Search is as simple, fast and pain-free as possible. 

I encourage you to get started with the new Search functionality and let us know how you find it! 

Read the full release notes and Search 2 Migration Guide on the Documentation site.