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Overview
Seattle-based Sur La Table is a premier kitchenware company offering top quality cookware and hard-to-find kitchen tools for culinary professionals and home chefs.

Sur La Table launched in 1972 with its first retail store and a mail order catalog that now reaches more than eight million consumers worldwide. In 1999, in response to escalating demand for its extensive collection of culinary products, Sur La Table launched an e-commerce and gift registry website at www.surlatable.com.

The number of products in the kitchenware industry increases daily, and finding the right product isn't always easy. Fast, accurate search results are fundamental in helping Sur La Table customers locate the products they're looking for so they can make informed purchasing decisions.

The Challenge
Sur La Table needed a search solution for its e-commerce websites and employee intranet that was flexible, affordable, and easy to implement. Because kitchenware products with names like Wüsthof and Le Creuset can be a challenge to spell, Sur La Table also needed a search engine that would correct spelling mistakes for its customers.

Sur La Table's e-commerce site offers more than 20,000 different kitchenware items across three websites. On an average day, www.surlatable.com will host more than 15,000 simultaneous users, and at peak times nearly 200,000. The Sur La Table intranet includes a wide variety of HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Office documents.

Sur La Table's main e-commerce pages are dynamically generated, which makes them difficult for traditional Web crawlers to index. A search solution was required that would work across multiple sites generated by different third-party products. "Several alternate vendors were unable to provide us with any assurance that their product would effectively index our different sites," explains Jonathan Grant, Sur La Table's lead web developer.

The Solution
Sur La Table deployed Google's GB-1001 to simplify search for customers and employees. "The Google Search Appliance met all our needs," says Grant. "There wasn't another vendor that could search all of our web and intranet content and perform to the same level as Google in relevance and spelling."

Because the Google Search Appliance gives administrators access to Google results as an XML data feed, Grant was able to integrate the results easily into a Cold Fusion environment. Pointing the Google Search Appliance at an offline product database, Grant then mapped the search results to live URLs using a few simple scripts. Besides avoiding redundancy errors that would otherwise occur on Sur La Table's template-driven site, this solution resulted in significant cost savings. "The Google box is based so heavily on open standards that it was easy to pull something like this together," Grant explains. "This is the beauty of the product to me." ¹

"The Google Search Appliance is half the cost of competing products and delivers the most accurate search results," Grant explains. "Everyone at Sur La Table is excited about how Google can help grow our business by enabling our employees and customers to quickly and easily find the products and information they need."

End Result
"I really liked the fact that Google let me test the product for 30 days before making the final decision to buy it," continues Grant. "The benefits were clear from the moment we got Google up and running on our network. The Google Search Appliance made it easier for our customers to make informed purchasing decisions, it saved us money, and it's been critical in helping Sur La Table meet its 2002 revenue goals."

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.

¹ Quoted in InternetWeek, June 18, 2002.

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