There's something happening with search

After almost two decades of only niche activity among the pure content findability experts, suddenly the topic of search has been a big one in our recent conferences and peer group meetings.

It’s almost as if when Google was added to the English dictionary in 2006, progress stopped. I realise that’s unfair, also to Google, which arguably has made progress, but still for many years, two things were certain when it came to search: Google was the king and on most websites site search was broken.

It's clear that something is happening at the moment

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Integrating AI-powered chatbots and search on your website

Across all industries, organizations are exploring how to leverage the power of Generative AI. Everyone is talking about AI today, but how can you take advantage of this in the content management world? How can you leverage all the content you’ve created and combine that with AI to provide a great experience for your customers?

In a recent members’ call we heard from Nicole Rogers from "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z. Nicole shared how Generative AI can be combined with your content and your CMS to enhance your site visitors’ web experiences. Examples of how you can incorporate this technology right on your website includes:

  • A chatbot in the corner of your website to answer your site visitors’ questions about your products and services.

  • Digital assistants (aka “copilots”) to help them along their journey, providing personalized recommendations and assisting in completing tasks like making a purchase.

  • AI-powered search to respond to your users’ search queries with detailed summaries.

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A tech update at the beginning of the Gen AI DIY-era

The hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.

To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we recently invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.

Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (last year) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower cost attached.

As expected, it became a 30-minute packed member’s call on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.

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It’s the people using it that will make or break any search application

Too often we don’t find what we are looking for when using the organization’s own search application. Whether it’s on the corporate site or the intranet. As a result, we waste time, scrolling for the content or fleeing back to Google, because we accept a somewhat saddening fact; that Google has a seemingly better overview of our content than anyone in our own organization.  

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Navigation is for losers!

The digital game is seemingly always changing and today there’s yet another major shift happening in the way we design websites and apps. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or app navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors? Should it be on the top or to the left? Should we have 8 navigational items or 22? And so it continues

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SEO strategy will become content strategy

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is widely known as a tactical discipline focused on optimising for Google and ensuring that at least some of your content gets found.

At recent J. Boye group meetings, I’ve noticed that SEO has become a much more strategic topic and even a driving force when it comes to content strategy. In other words, SEO informs content creation and curation including the decisions on what goes on the website.

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