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Challenge |
Overview
More than 35 million people turn to USATODAY.com each
month for the same breaking news and informational graphics they find
in each printed issue of USA TODAY. This award-winning news and information
site delivers more than 250,000 pages of breaking news, updated 24 hours
a day, seven days a week.
The Challenge
Chat Joglekar, USATODAY.com’s manager of business
development, needed a way to improve the quality of search results for
readers and editors. He also needed to bring search in house in order
to gain better control over access to the results. "Because we
outsourced search to a third party, the search results pages lived off
the site,” reports Joglekar. “Now, with control over the
interface and results pages, we can restrict access to search results
by date. And that has helped increase our archive revenue.”
The Solution
USATODAY.com chose the GB-5005 for site search, as well as a GB-1001 for internal story development and another GB-1001 to organize its Travel collection, which includes pages linked from partner sites.
The team at USATODAY.com used the Google Search Appliances to customize the types of collections they needed. For the external site, the GB-5005 organizes and searches a rolling 14-day collection. By restricting access to the last two weeks, USATODAY.com is able to charge a premium for access to their archives.
Limiting access to the last 14 days of articles also helps USATODAY.com deliver faster response rates with more relevant results. The USATODAY.com team uses KeyMatch to place important pages and sections above the search results based on certain terms and phrases.
For USATODAY.com’s Travel section, Joglekar and team were able to set up a GB-1001 so that it returned search results within the Travel section, as well as results from their travel partners.
The GB-5005 and two GB-1001s took about a day to install and deploy. “It was pretty simple to set up and get running,” Joglekar says. “However, we wanted to integrate the USATODAY.com search results with our Google WebSearch results and AdSense ads, so we took the time to get it right.”
End Result
“The appliance has given us more flexibility,”
reveals Joglekar. In addition to providing better and faster results
for readers and editors, USATODAY.com is now combining the internal
search results with Google WebSearch™ results and with Google
AdSense™. This is possible because the Google Search Appliance
returns search results in XML. “The nice thing is that we can
now deliver one comprehensive search page for our visitors,” he
says. An additional benefit has been the creation of richer articles.
“Our editors find what is out on the site easier, which helps
them add blocks to articles that point out related content on the website,”
Joglekar adds.“Control and flexibility are the biggest benefits
the Google Search Appliance has given us. Today we completely control
search on our site, and we have the flexibility to modify the solution
at any time as our needs change.”
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.
Contact sales for more information.
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