Guidelines and recommendatoins for the use of the AI-enhanced content search

Multiple Search Bars and Entry Points to Content

• The AI-enhanced content search and the existing catalog search will continue to run in parallel until further notice. Please rest assured: we will not replace any current functionality without clear and timely communication.

  

• The two search functions are based on different technologies, approaches, and scopes—which is why their results may differ. imc plans to gradually expand the AI-enhanced search index to cover platform-wide content, including items that are directly assigned to users but not linked to any catalog or channel.

• Currently, the AI-enhanced search covers all learning content from catalogs and channels which are accessible to the user searching. This makes it a strong candidate for becoming the primary access point to content. You may want to review whether some of the additional search bars—such as those in dashboard panels—can be hidden if they duplicate this functionality. Simplifying the interface can help reduce user confusion.

• If your systems provides users with several search bars, you might want to consider to use titles or placeholder texts (within the search bars) to give the users a hint at what they search through in that particular case.

• For your information: The navigation search, mainly used by admins and managers to find pages in the system, can still be accessed via the top navigation but now via this icon:
  

  

Data protection notice

• Search queries are processed in such a way that they cannot be traced back to individual persons, but are associated solely with the technical system from which they originated. No personal data is collected, stored, or linked to specific users during the processing of search queries.

• Search terms used in queries are stored exclusively for anonymized reporting purposes. In the near future imc will provide customers with a report designed to help customers understand general search behavior, such as commonly used terms and how many results were displayed. The report will not contain any data that would allow identification of individual users or their specific queries.

• We recommend advising users not to enter sensitive or personal information into search queries, as these terms may appear in anonymized reports that could be accessible to administrators or others within your organization, depending on how data is shared.

Decide on the best search type for your organisation

• As described in the functional reference the content search supports two search types or modes:

  • Lexical Search
    This mode directly matches the words from the user's query with titles, descriptions, and keywords of learning content. It’s a purely text-based lookup—no artificial intelligence involved.

  • Semantic Search
    In this mode, both the indexed learning content and the user’s query are converted into vectors using AI technologies. This allows the system to detect semantic similarities and retrieve related concepts and themes even if they are phrased differently from the query.

• If your organisation does not want to allow any further AI services to be deployed to your system you can stay with lexical search. If the choice is on you, the following table can help make a decision.