Search technology
A good search engine is often critical to the usability of a website. We offer a range of different search solutions, ensuring users find fast accurate results.
For a traditional site-wide search we often use the excellent search engine ht://Dig . This Open Source search engine software effectively indexes your entire website allowing quick keyword searches.
Example: Michell Instruments
For larger enterprise-level projects we make use of Xapian, an Open Source set of search engine tools that evolved out of over 20 years commercial and academic experience. As well as being capable of scaling to very large datasets (the WebTop search engine used Xapian to index half a billion web pages) Xapian provides an ultra-fast search, ensuring your users don’t have to wait to get results.
Example: Cambridge City Council FAQ
We also work on the usability of search engines. Often a list of results isn’t enough and with large sets of data the user needs more intuitive methods to drill down to the information they are interested in.
For the University of London we developed a search engine using MySQL for the project UKAT. When browsing words via their first-letter, results pages were designed with a neat letter-based index instead of the common page-based notation, enabling users to quickly jump to the word they are interested in.
Example: University of London UKAT
For more information please contact us.
