Finding your people with Glean

Lauren Zhu

Engineering

What’s a company without its people? And what on Earth are you supposed to do if you can’t find any of them? Well we don’t know either. That’s why we’ve worked hard to build spell checking and fuzzy search to easily find your people. Believe it or not—every day, thousands of Glean queries are people looking for people. So we recognize how important it is for you to find people within your company. That means for us, it’s really important to be fast and smart.

Every day, Glean users make thousands of people-seeking queries within their companies.

But…it isn’t easy. Even if your company has tens of thousands of employees, we still want to return the best results in the blink of an eye. And even though people can have really similar names, we should know who you’re really looking for. 

Maybe you don’t know how to spell someone’s name because you’ve only heard it in passing. Or perhaps you met Katy Lee in the micro kitchen while making morning coffee. But is it Katy or Katie? Lee, Le, or Li even? Google can’t save you here. Whether you don’t know how to spell a name, you simply don’t remember the name, or you just made a couple typos on your keyboard trying to type the name, we’ve got you covered.

How does it all work? If you’re looking for someone specific with Glean, look no further than our simple search bar. Built into our search engine is enterprise spell check. It’s robust to typos of all kinds, and intelligently surfaces personalized corrections for you as an employee of your company

Let’s break that down a little bit. You—as in the corrections we show you are optimized based on the content you have access to. Your company—as in our corrections are derived from your company’s corpus. And this is done at lightning speed since we do a lot of the heavy lifting offline before you even start typing. When we’re talking about people and names, these are all factors of utmost importance. Piece them together and you get a perfect recipe for a spell checker that can figure out exactly who you’re looking for.

Let’s say a week after meeting Katy/Katie Lee/Le/Li you wanted to message her about making a run to get Starbucks. Of course you’ve got to find her knowing only how to pronounce her name. This is where fuzzy search—the perfect solution to your problem—steps in. For names specifically, we use fuzzy search, meaning we can find all names in your company that are close to what you type. So for this very ambiguously spelled name, instead of trying multiple times, all you have to do is type your best guess. That’s it! Glean does the rest. Glean pulls up all potential names of real people that are really close so you can find your new friend in an instant. Oh—turns out I was completely wrong—it was Catie Li!

Here at Glean, we know that finding people is just as important as finding the documents, answers, and error tickets you need to do your best work. That’s why we work so hard to make search a smooth and seamless process— regardless of what you’re trying to find. 

Want to check it out? Reach out to get a demo!

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