Funnelback Internet and Enterprise Search Seminar - News from the first London Funnelback seminar
This morning, Funnelback UK hosted an Internet & Enterprise Search seminar at a beautiful venue in the precincts of Westminster Abbey (see the photo at the foot of this post).
There was a great turnout to see the line-up of presentations, which included two case studies from Funnelback Search clients; the Electoral Commission and the London School of Economics.
The event kicked off with an introduction to Funnelback UK from its Managing Director, Stephen Morgan - who is, of course, also the Managing Director of Squiz UK. Funnelback has been going strong in Australia for almost twenty years and, since Squiz acquired the company last year, is beginning to become well known in the UK, and worldwide, as an excellent search solution provider. Steve also detailed the primary benefits of the Funnelback offering, according to clients who have selected it:
- Contextual Navigation creates sub-topics from a user's query (making the information easier to navigate for the user) without the need to reformat metadata - it works immediately on both structured and unstructured data.
- The administration interface is easy-to-use, flexible and powerful. It allows the administer greater control and the ability to extend the applications of Funnelback Search.
- Funnelback's Pattern Analysis offers real-time business information based on patterns in user searches. The system can generate reports to inform business decisions and be set up to alert the organisation of spikes in specific query terms or other patterns in user search behaviour.
- Funnelback offer a complete set of support services to ensure that our clients maximise the potential of Funnelback and to provide customised search solutions to meet specific business requirements.
An overview of Funnelback's administration interface and key features was presented by Alwyn Davis, Technical Consultant at Funnelback UK. He demonstrated how easy it is to set up a collection to be searched and to administer the search settings via Funnelback's intuitive administration interface.
Stephen Emmott, Head of Web Services at the London School of Economics and Political Science, presented a case study detailing the changes and benefits which the LSE have realised through the use of Funnelback Search on their websites. They now have improved search results, faceted and contextual navigation to help the user find information faster and much more control over search performance and results rankings. Stephen described how Funnelback search data has highlighted the need for changes and improvements to site content which, in turn, has had a positive effect on their SEO for external website search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines. We will be posting Stephen's presentation on the blog tomorrow, along with more detail on his experiences and observations.
Chrystyna Chymera, Corporate Communication Officer at the Electoral Commission, presented a case study of their recent search project and implementation of Funnelback website search. It was interesting to hear the requirements the company had for their search solution, both in terms of their business objectives and their Freedom of Information request responsibilities. As an organisation with a great deal of information and a broad range of users, they needed a search engine which could offer excellent results out of the box, as well as the ability to prioritise results and tweak rankings. A comparison of their previous search solution's results page against the improved Funnelback version provided a great demonstration of the usability and functionality features of Funnelback. We will be posting more details of Chrystyna's presentation, along with her slides, in a forthcoming blog post.
David Hawking, pre-eminent information retrieval researcher and Funnelback's Chief Scientist, gave a talk on the need for a Search Master within all but the smallest organisations. Even if there isn't an individual with that specific job title, the responsibility for maintaining, improving and monitoring search needs to be prioritised and clearly assigned. David's talk covered the reasons why search is so vitally important and the tools which can improve search results. Of course, we will also be providing more detail on David's talk in a forthcoming blog post, along with his slides.
It was a really great day and we're grateful to all of the people who came along and asked such interesting questions. As mentioned, there will be more info on the day's events tomorrow, so stay tuned. Remember you can subscribe to the Squiz blog via RSS if you want to be sure not to miss any of our news.
Published:
31 Mar 2010 5:48pm
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