{"id":339984,"date":"2017-05-04T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T17:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1484899"},"modified":"2017-05-04T01:00:27","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T17:00:27","slug":"slack-beefs-up-its-search-to-find-the-right-person-to-ask-a-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/slack-beefs-up-its-search-to-find-the-right-person-to-ask-a-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Slack beefs up its search to find the right person to ask a question"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As a company gets bigger and bigger, finding out the answer to some question you have in your head \u2014 like the definition of some kind of acronym or the right process to hire someone \u2014 is going to be harder and harder to find.<\/p>\n

For Slack, which given that it\u2019s a constant stream of communication, that\u2019s going to be doubly true. But over time Slack wants to become a kind of lexicon of information, with everything easily accessible, and it\u2019s starting to do that today with a big update to its search function. Now, when an employee searches for a topic, search should point them to a good person to answer that question or the channel that\u2019s best to check on for that information. Slack wants to be the entire\u00a0foundation of a business, but that starts with ensuring that employees can actually be more productive instead of spending all their time digging in menus for information.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s tons of info in email, but it\u2019s in silos or other individual inboxes \u2014 and on the other side there are hundreds of Wiki products, they take too much work and get stale and aren\u2019t comprehensive,\u201d Noah Weiss, Slack\u2019s Search Learning & Intelligence group, said. \u201cSlack, because\u00a0it\u2019s a place where people are\u00a0er doing work all day, there\u2019s this collective knowledge amassing over time. We\u2019re able to tap into that in mostly public channels.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s coming out of Search Learning & Intelligence group, which is trying to leverage all the data it has to build a smarter way to get access to all the information that comes out of a constant wave of conversations. Weiss, who was previously at Foursquare, is working on probably one of the most complicated and important problems Slack might face: jumping from a massive set of chat rooms to something that operates functionally as a base of operations for an entire organization.<\/p>\n

Slack a darling in Silicon Valley, and while it\u2019s amassed 5 million DAUs and 1.5 million paying customers it still needs to set its eyes higher on the massive companies that will propel it to an even larger business. And right now at face value it may seem that Slack\u2019s conversational streams are chaotic and difficult to navigate \u2014 which is why this change to search, even as a first step, is critical in making it more accessible as teams get bigger and bigger.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe when you write something, he\u2019s responsive to you but you\u2019re not responsive to him, or you need to follow\u00a0the channels you care about\u00a0\u2014 we have to understand how those channels are related to each other and this different graph structure,\u201d Weiss said.\u00a0\u201cWhat we had to build for this is\u00a0understanding what are the topics in a company, what\u2019s the unique vocabulary people use in an org to discuss work. It\u2019s very different to a knowledge graph at Google, where there\u2019s one canonical set of entities\u00a0in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

That problem still requires a lot of data around how people talk and what are some specific nuances and quirks to companies. It\u2019s currently restricted to teams of 50 or more \u2014 the sweet spot where the search starts being useful, Weiss said \u2014 for paying customers on standard, plus and enterprise plans. As people use it more, the algorithm should get smarter and make it easier and easier to find the right person or channel to ask a question.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really making slack a kind of great connective tissue for even the largest organizations,\u201d Weiss said.\u00a0\u201cSearch results only get more useful with more history but also more people in channels. It becomes harder to know exactly who you talk to when companies get bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" As a company gets bigger and bigger, finding out the answer to some question you have in your head — like the definition of some kind of acronym or the right process to hire someone — is going to be harder and harder to find. For Slack, which given that it’s a constant stream of communication, that’s going to be doubly true. But over time Slack wants to become a kind… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

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