Gartner defines Insight Engines as follows: Insight engines apply relevancy methods to discover, analyze, describe and organize content and data. They enable the interactive or proactive delivery or synthesis of information to people, and data to machines, in the context of their respective business moments. Insight engines should be viewed as platforms on which applications are provided, developed or augmented by applying the capabilities listed above to specific employee and customer experience use cases. Such applications are provided out of the box by vendors (e.g., intranet or site search), developed through technical partnerships (e.g., search within third-party applications), developed with customers in-house (e.g., expert finder), or developed through integration with third-party applications (e.g., extracting data from documents to support RPA).
Gartner defines Search and Product Discovery as applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons, and ultimately selection of products. They provide search (keyword, natural language and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration, and curation of business rules to make a product discoverable based on business needs), product recommendations, catalog navigation (and SEO keyword automation), personalization and analytics capabilities through SaaS to enable customers (B2C and B2B) to transact. They also enable providers (merchandisers, content managers, and search specialists) to support customer experiences. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search interfaces are now appearing. Search and Product Discovery applications use product data to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons and ultimately product selection. Search results can be highly visual, using engaging layouts and multimedia. Content other than product information, such as educational information, compliance materials and related news may also be included in search results to engage customers and further support buying decisions.