Nobody puts Search in the corner! - Findability Day 2012

A case study from The Royal Institute of TechnologyNobody puts Search in the corner

Why a search project?

Who is using search today?- Students- Employees- Prospective students

Behind the scenes

- Play Framework with Java- Google Search Appliance- Java- Heroku

TechnologiesProject key values- Use standards- Make data accessible via api´s- Make all possible data publicly available

Featured searchresults - Navigation help- Direct information- Drive traffic to products- Show "hidden" data

Project timeline

Difficulties

- Autonomous sub-organizations and thus distributed information and ownership- No one has knowledge or ownership of all information- What is relevant?- Missing data or search unfriendly data

Lessons learned

- It´s all about the data sources- Much more than a search engine- Connections and corporate contacts matters- It´s a cross organization and cross competence project- Start early with requirements - We need to put much more attention to day to day management

What´s next?- Search as a service- Crowdsourcing synonyms collection- Emphasize search as a navigation method- Mashups of existing data sources for interesting user needs

Thank you for listening!