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Challenge Solution Product Benefit Chris Atienza |
Overview
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a 34-year-old private nonprofit media enterprise, owned and operated by 349 U.S. public television stations. Each week, 100 million viewers watch quality noncommercial TV programs on these PBS member stations. PBS also acquires shows from producers and member stations, and helps to distribute and promote them to its local affiliates.
A critical goal of PBS.org is to engender loyalty in users by providing comprehensive program information along with deep educational and background content related to its wide range of noncommercial programming. The organization’s public site, PBS.org, is the most visited dot-org site in the world, with an average of more than 16 million visits and over 200 million page views per month. The site features companion pages for more than 500 regular programs and specials plus online learning activities for children, parents, educators, and other engaged viewers.
The Challenge
PBS maintains a public site with 127,000 static pages and documents on eight Linux and Solaris servers. Because its public programming is supported by members, PBS tends to engender strong loyalty that extends beyond viewing habits to site visits. Visitors often come to PBS.org to find local PBS station and viewing schedules. They stay to explore extensive background information for specific programs, learning guides for educators and students, comprehensive web-only content, public affairs material, award-winning kids’ content. They can also shop for program-related audio, video and books.
As with any site providing information that can change frequently, search is increasingly important to PBS.org. But budget constraints and earlier decisions had led the organization to rely on a freeware search application that was no longer up to the task of supporting millions of users. “The more people used our site as a tool, the worse our search problem became,” says Dave Johnston, PBS Senior Director of Technology. “The results were not very accurate, compared to what we knew Google could do. Besides that, our freeware solution didn’t work on Linux, and we are in the process of moving away from Sun Solaris for our web server applications.” Adding to the headache was the fact that it had become increasingly difficult for the freeware to be configured for site-specific searches.
The Solution
PBS bought four GB-1001 appliances, and runs a load balancer between two of them for the master search site. Soon, the organization plans to deploy the other two to crawl the 175 member stations nightly. “We spent so much time and effort supporting our freeware search. When we said we’d get the Google Search Appliance, everyone was really excited,” says Johnston. The two boxes now in use at PBS crawl the site and serve up pages sharing a virtual IP address.
Implementation was easy, says Johnston: “We reviewed the product for a couple of weeks. Actual installation took just a few hours, including the first crawl and index.” There was no training time required, he says, and from the start, “Every keyword got much, much better search results.” Prior to using Google Search Appliance, the web team had to manually configure the old application to return content based on PBS-specific terminology and titles, because it could not find them on its own.
Results
What a difference Google has made, says Johnston. “Google excels at putting the most relevant top-level page up front in the results.” To compare the Google Search Appliance to the previous search tool, PBS tested finding its annual report. The freeware application pulled up as its top result a middle page of an old document, but Google returned the top page of the most current report. “The bar is higher for PBS,” says Johnston. “Our users demand quality television, and quality search on PBS.org is part of that experience. We have not found anything that delivers that quality like Google.”
Using the Google Search Appliance, PBS no longer worries about operating system compatibility to run the search engine, and software updates are included in the license. Chris Atienza, Associate Director of Technology and lead implementer of Google at PBS, likes the ability to customize a look and feel. “XML/XSL has made this very configurable for us,” Atienza says. “The way Google Search Appliance is set up is really brilliant.”
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google’s award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units.
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