Why Your Search Tool Should Work Like Your Brain

Accepting mediocre

Before joining Betty, I worked as an engineer for a company that built human flight-rated rocket boosters. My experience as a rocket booster engineer taught me how strongly people cling to the familiar. In aerospace, this cautious approach makes sense—when you're strapping humans to explosive materials bound for space, "flight-proven" becomes a crucial assurance that your rocket will fly, not explode.

While reliability is essential, an overreliance on past successes can stifle progress. The reasoning is simple: why change what works?  But the "this is how we've always done it" mindset can be as dangerous as untested innovation, limiting our ability to develop safer, more efficient systems.

This resistance to change isn't unique to rocket science—it's prevalent everywhere. At Betty, we are regularly hearing about terrible search products that have the same shortcomings they did 20+ years ago - issues like sensitivity to spelling, inability to capture similar meanings, and the tedious task of maintaining content tags or complex taxonomies. Organizations accept these flaws because the alternatives are expensive solutions that still require significant manual effort. It’s not surprising that most organizations end up with the familiar internal search tool that sucks.

Your Brain doesn’t word match

When someone tells you “It’s sunny outside” your mind makes connections beyond other times you have heard the word sunny. Most likely your brain will make connections to being warm from sunlight or possibly a need to grab some sunscreen.  These connections are more relevant to your next action than reliving only the last couple times you heard the phrase “It’s sunny outside”.  Your brain uses the meaning of the words to find relevant memories. 

Making Search not Suck

If your brain doesn’t word match, why should your search tool? Recent AI advances have made it possible to understand the intent behind words, not just match them exactly. Enter semantic search—a technology that looks for content matching the users’ intent rather than just their exact words. While major search engines have used this for years, recent AI developments have made semantic search accessible to organizations of all sizes. By mimicking how our brains naturally make connections, semantic search eliminates the need to game the system with perfect keywords.

In other words, it allows for a search experience that doesn’t suck.