From Marriott to the Democratic National Convention to Yahoo!, significant data breaches have become practically normalized. This is, of course, nonsense; privacy is a fundamental right and the fact that major organizations cannot guarantee your digital privacy is an enormous problem. While compromised email addresses and passwords are one thing, the recent crack of data and analytics company Ascension’s Elasticsearch-based database spilled more than 24 million banking and financial documents onto the web for an all-you-can-steal buffet. For companies, this should be a giant flashing red light that says, “Ensure your security is up to snuff.”

Users want relevant results from their search queries. But, in addition, they want their search tool to “understand” what their queries mean based on context. In other words, know the difference between what was expressed in the query and what was intended.

That was the purpose of the algorithms—the tunable relevance calculations—created by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. One of the parameters that improved relevance was user interaction with results. More relevant results reduced the uncertainty inherent in search, increasing value for users and vendors alike.

Attivio has been at the forefront of secure search-based applications for the last 8 years. Using our patented query-time join capabilities we are able to store security information in the index separate from the content and use it to apply security filters automatically to ensure that end users only see the most relevant content they are allowed to see. This allows us to automatically preserve security permissions from sources such as SharePoint, Jive, Confluence and other content repositories.