Google Search Appliance Success Story

In preparation for the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and a major product announcement, our Client set out on a project to redesign their web site to improve their Internet presence. Part of this redesign required the need for a better site and document search solution, focused on improving the relevancy of search results and unifying search from various web portals into a clean, intuitive interface.

Client engaged Innovent for its Google Search Appliance implementation expertise and the project tasks were essentially organized around three themes: 1) Execute search from any Client site or sub site, 2) Unify the results from disparate sources into a single interface and 3) Utilize a highly-portable, lightweight framework.

The Google Search Appliance was easily configured to resolve two requirements for the Client : the loading of data from multiple disparate sources, and the federation of results into categories that could be clearly refined. The data is loaded into the index once, but presented in multiple ways through the configuration of collections. Once configured, the search solution was able to present results from multiple locations as if they belonged to a single search concept. In this way, for example, “support” results could be presented as a single set of data, even though they were loaded from forums, a knowledge base, and general pages throughout the Client’s primary domain. These results could be further refined into sub-categories through collection configuration.

Approximately 75,000 pages of data exist within the index, with a large blend of data being used through collections throughout the website. Search results can quickly be retrieved from anywhere within the Client’s domains from a clear search textbox in the upper-right corner of the site. The search results interface has the same look-and-feel regardless of what source data is being previewed, giving the user uniform access to the Client’s information.

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