Introducing: Consensus 2.0

November 1, 2023 By Eric Olson

Today, we are thrilled to unveil the most monumental upgrade to Consensus ever!

We have dubbed it Consensus 2.0

Consensus 2.0 reflects the commitment to our users to build the BEST academic search engine in the world. We have completely overhauled the way a Consensus search works, improving its speed, precision, and most importantly, our core search relevance.

What Has Changed?

🧠 Smarter Paper Search: Find more relevant papers than ever before with our intelligent AI search.

Consensus 1.0 only worked well when a user asked a fully-formed question that followed a few specific formats (“does x cause y?”, “what is the impact of z?”).

Consensus 2.0 will effectively find relevant papers for all sorts of queries!

This improvement comes from our brand-new search algorithm that combines keyword search with AI-powered vector search over our entire corpus of 200m documents to produce a powerful hybrid search that is both flexible and reliable.

🎯 Precisely Extracted Answers: Easily find the insight you’re after, with new query-relevant answers.

Consensus 1.0 delivered rigidly extracted sentences from papers that ignored the query until the final step. This caused our results to be clunky and imprecise.

Consensus 2.0 extracts question-relevant information from papers, based on your query! This allows our results to be more flexible and relevant to what the user is looking for.

🎨 Fresh Design: Experience an overhauled UI, crafted entirely based on your collective feedback.

The single biggest piece of feedback that we received about the design of Consensus 1.0 was that the title of the paper was not prominent enough.

We mocked up nearly a dozen possible new result page interfaces and showed them to users via surveys and user interviews. The design of Consensus 2.0 was decided by the collective vote of our incredible users.

The biggest change is bringing the title of the paper to the top of a result tile and putting the extracted answer in a grey text box.

 

Unlock all of our new features with Consensus Premium

We have so many exciting things in the works to share with you all this year.

All of the features on our roadmap come directly from our users and we can’t wait to keep building them for you!

Many of these new features will be behind a paywall, to get full access to everything we build and support our mission to make research more accessible, sign-up for Consensus Premium today.

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