Urban Land Institute Google Search Implementation
Posted Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 10:15 am by Sara Franco (3 posts)
Beaconfire was asked to assist Urban Land Institute (ULI) implement the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to replace the Endeca search engine which had been integrated with Sitecore. ULI is the preeminent, multidisciplinary real estate organization, facilitating an open exchange of ideas, information, and experience among local, national, and international industry leaders and policy makers dedicated to creating better places.
But the members who counted on ULI’s website weren’t always able to find what they were looking for. ULI’s approximate 60 websites had different implementations (many not on Sitecore) and the current search did not effectively allow the user to search across all ULI related sites. Beaconfire implemented the Google GSA search application, giving ULI the robust functionality of Google Search. Part of this implementation included giving the user an option to search on the specific site or across all ULI and created a common advanced search and search results page across all ULI sites. Beaconfire also implemented a number of Sitecore updates which allowed the search results to display certain data, such as secured pages and the update date. You can try out the new search functionality at http://www.uli.org/ or http://urbanland.uli.org/.
Now, the ULI websites offer a consistent and reliable search experience and results for ULI members and site users.
May 18th, 2011 at 1:29 pm
[...] Google Mini and Google Search Appliance. These are the heavy hitters. Using either of these can involve hosting the search machine yourself. If you need a lot of control of your search pages, or you have tens of hundreds of domains, and hundreds of thousands of pages and people looking to search them, you want to look here. One of our clients did. [...]