Official Google Cloud Blog: Google Search Appliance

Hayneedle takes the pain out of buying furniture online with the Google Search Appliance

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Posted by David Markle, Director of Retail Experience, Hayneedle

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is David Markle, Director of Retail Experience for Hayneedle, an online retailer of home furnishings. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

Hayneedle.com offers millions of home products, requiring a robust shopping experience to help customers discover exactly what they're looking for. The name "hayneedle" contains the seed of a promise – a perfect find for each customer's unique needs and tastes. To that end, Hayneedle has embarked on a process of continuous improvement of our site's discovery tools, including the addition of a much better search solution, powered by Google Search Appliance.

Our previous search solutions couldn't handle the large amount of content indexing and diversity of search queries that hayneedle.com customers entered. Performance lagged, and the search results weren't highly relevant. Our customers demanded better, and we set out to fix the situation.

We considered every possible search provider in the market, grading them on a list of more than 100 features with a focus on performance and search relevancy. We evaluated each for its potential to provide us a scalable solution that could grow with our business. Google Search Appliance emerged as the leader in the areas that mattered most to our customers and clearly offered the best return on investment.

Since we began using Google Search, hayneedle.com has seen revenue per search increase by more than 20%. In addition, the conversion rate for shoppers who use search has increased by 12%, and the average order value for shoppers who use search has gone up 5%. Google is the perfect partner as we seek to continually improve our retail search solution and help our customers find the perfect products for their home.

Major Turkish bank Yapı Kredi makes search the focus with the GSA

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Posted by Yakup Dogan, Assistant General Manager for Alternative Distribution Channels, Yapı Kredi

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Yakup Dogan, Assistant General Manager in charge of Alternative Distribution Channels at Yapı Kredi, one of the largest retail banks and the largest credit card issuing bank in Turkey. View their case study to learn more and see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

For me, one of the best things about working at Yapi Kredi is the genuine desire to make the banking experience as simple and enjoyable as possible for our customers. With this in mind, my team and I recently undertook a major re-design project to help improve the customer experience for the three million unique monthly visitors to our website.

And it was a big re-design. We literally got rid of everything on the site apart from a search bar. No confusing menus. No clutter. Visitors to the site can type what they need into the search bar and get directed straight to the answer. It is easy to use and we have had fantastic feedback from our customers. Not only has the number of daily site searches increased by 1000%, but users are spending an extra 30 seconds on average on the site.

Most importantly of all, the shift to the new site has made a genuine business impact. We’ve seen a 134% increase in loan applications since we re-designed the site and I attribute this to how easy it is to navigate around and use the site.

It’s safe to say we couldn’t have done any of this without the GSA. It offered advanced relevancy, ease of use, familiarity and lower TCO. Data security is very important to us and the GSA’s ability to integrate all of the domain’s security features was crucial.

Despite the enormous growth in use of the site, thanks to the GSA the number of admin staff I need to allocate to search remains the same. And because the volume of searches is now so much higher, we can better understand what customers need and are looking for the most. This, combined with web analytics, opens up a high level of insight into our customer’s expectations, frustrations and needs.

This enhanced visibility also enables us to better target our promotion of products to the right people at the right time during their visit, and increase sales. I firmly believe we’ve set a new standard for a simple, effective website experience in the financial sector.

NoMoreRack elevates service for discount shoppers with Google Search Appliance

Monday, June 2, 2014

Posted by Vishal Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, NoMoreRack

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Vishal Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer of NoMoreRack, an online retailer of discounted brand-name apparel and household products based in New York City. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

When we launched NoMoreRack in 2010 we started out with eight products a day on our website. Today, we have 15,000 apparel, home, and electronics products at any given time. To make our fast-growing inventory easy for customers to find, we’ve chosen Google Search Appliance (GSA).

As we evolve NoMoreRack, we’re working hard to turn the flash-sale shopping model on its head. We’re not about buying a small number of discount products from closeout companies, and then getting rid of them quickly. We buy thousands of units of in-demand day to day quality goods directly from the same manufacturers and suppliers who sell to top retailers, so we can keep products in stock for days instead of hours. We also want to provide a better online shopping experience than what people usually expect from a discount retailer – which is where the GSA plays the perfect role.

Our previous site search was custom built by our in-house team. It was based on tagging, and although it served the purpose, it did not have advanced features like suggest as you type, relevance or linguistics strategy. This meant sometimes customers couldn't find the exact product they wanted.

GSA gives all of the tools we missed from our homegrown search – both internally and for customers. GSA will index every word from product descriptions, so if customers use some of that language in a search – like “floral floor-length sun dress” – they are far more likely to see these products in search results. We expect the search results to be more relevant, since GSA will adapt to how our customers search, and will serve up better results over time. Our customers will get to use refinements for things like color, size, and price to narrow down results faster and more accurately.

With tools like Searchandiser, a third party tool powered by the GSA, we’ll create special webpages around popular products or brands that customers search for, and display these eye-catching pages once they’ve conducted a search or refined by a category.

We’ve got the right merchandise at the right prices that our customers are asking for – and with the GSA, we can show them the right product at the right time.

The Wasserstrom Company gets restaurant supplies into customer hands faster with Google Search Appliance

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Posted by Dale Edman, Vice President of E-Commerce and Online Marketing, The Wasserstrom Company

Revised Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dale Edman, Vice President of E-Commerce and Online Marketing for The Wasserstrom Company, a supplier and distributor of restaurant and food service supplies based in Columbus, Ohio. Due to a misprint, the Search speed improved for businesses and consumers, with results delivered in 300 milliseconds not .003 seconds. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

When our customers in the restaurant and foodservice industries visit our website, they don’t have time for leisurely browsing – they know what they need and they want to find it fast. The same goes for consumers who don’t want to waste time hunting for that perfect cast-iron skillet or chef’s knife from among our 100,000 products. Search results on our website used to take as long as 10 seconds to show up, which was frustrating for shoppers and would drive them away. We needed to bring speed to our search, as well as more user-friendly ways to promote our products in our search tools without calling in IT help. We knew we had to go Google. It made sense to choose the people who know search the best.

One of the things slowing searches down was the way our IBM search product managed our customized catalogues, which is how our business customers shop for their own hand-picked products. Even if a catalogue contained only a couple of hundred products, every search request looked for matches within the entire product database – an unnecessary process that created delays.

For both the business and consumer sides of the business, we chose the Google Search Appliance (GSA), an improved search product targeted at online retailers like us. We also used the Searchandiser, a third party tool powered by the GSA, that gave us more control over how we promote products in search pages – for example, we can add synonyms and refinements that help customers search more accurately.

Search speed improved for businesses and consumers, with results delivered in 300 milliseconds instead of 10 seconds. The GSA searches only the products within a business customer’s catalogue, which means results turn around faster. In the near future, we’ll use GSA to add even more custom touches to business customers’ catalogues – like detailed descriptions of products, and special search landing pages built around brands or product types. With the GSA, our customers find what they need faster, which means less time spent searching and more time for making their kitchens run smoothly.

Atlanta Police Department makes city streets safer with Google Maps and Google Search Appliance

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Posted by LeAnne Browning, Lieutenant and Video Integration Center Project Director, Atlanta Police Department

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Lieutenant LeAnne Browning from the Atlanta Police Department (APD). She and her colleagues have incorporated search and mapping data into police operations to make the department more efficient. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At the Atlanta Police Department, our 2,000-plus sworn officers are devoted to working with the community to develop innovative problem-solving strategies. Thanks to these efforts, the crime rate dropped by 44% between 2000 and 2012. We’re proud of our strong reputation among Atlanta residents and law enforcement agencies around the world.

But we know we can always do better, which is why we started Operation Shield back in 2007. The goal is to further prevent crime and improve emergency preparedness with cutting-edge technology and private sector partnerships. One major component is our Video Integration Center (VIC), a surveillance hub and physical security information management platform built with Google Maps technology that gives us instant access to 2,500 cameras throughout the city. When a 911 call comes in, it’s automatically plotted in Google Maps and paired with the nearest live camera images. That way, operators can give real-time information to responding officers rushing to the scene.

Now we’re using Google Search Appliance (GSA) to make the VIC even more powerful. Our partner, Edge360, helped us develop Search360, a search and investigative tool built with GSA that allows operators to search across multiple databases for details like prior incidents at the same address, license plate numbers or descriptions of subjects. Since the system is integrated with Google Maps, it runs automated searches based on geocoding to give analysts fast visual representation of search results. This helps them generate a photographic lineup to send to the responding detective’s mobile data terminal, smartphone or tablet before he or she reaches the crime scene.

Gathering information for investigations used to be slow and tedious. As a detective seven years ago, I had to travel to the scene, interview victims and witnesses, then spend hours or even days back in the office running searches in multiple databases, such as our mugshots database or our report management system. With help from Edge360 and Google, that process is almost instantaneous.

When I joined the department 19 years ago, I never imagined how technology could work in tandem with the traditional tools police officers rely on—our instinct and experience. But that’s exactly what’s happening with Operation Shield. We’re hoping it will improve the quality of life for Atlanta residents by making our streets, parks and neighborhoods safer and more prepared than ever before.

Prima Supply speeds up search for restaurant and food service business owners

Monday, March 31, 2014

Posted by Joshua Moxon, marketing director at Prima Supply

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Joshua Moxon, marketing director for Prima Supply, a family-owned restaurant supply company based in Louisville, Kentucky. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

Customers shopping online at Prima Supply – usually small business owners looking for great deals on restaurant and food service equipment – know what they want, and they’re price-conscious. To help them make choices, our goal is to provide accurate product information, including specifications and availability, and deliver it as quickly as possible. Google Search Appliance (GSA) has met our need for speed, and for better control over adding content to search.

In the past, our search product, Amazon Cloud Search, stymied our goals for fast results and helpful content. Visitors to our site had to wait as long as 15 seconds for results, especially if they used refinements for pricing, since that information wasn’t cached. Our bounce rate was higher than normal, which meant that shoppers were leaving our site because they didn’t want to wait around for results.

It wasn’t just customers that were unhappy. We weren’t pleased with our lack of ability to add synonyms or include misspellings, which would have improved our search accuracy. We’d have to bring in IT help if we wanted to add content to search or if we wanted to fine-tune results – for example, promoting certain products or brands within search results. Using outside help took extra time, which meant we couldn’t be agile in responding to customers.

We didn’t have to look hard for a new search product – GSA was the only one we considered. We knew that nobody does search like Google, and we wanted the same fast, easy search for our site that we get when we go to Google.com. Instead of bringing in a software developer when we needed to add synonyms or create landing pages for products or brands, GSA helps us do this work ourselves, with no delays or extra costs.

Three-compartment stainless steel sinks are a popular item on the Prima Supply website, and customers searching for a specific brand might not realize that there are other options from different manufacturers. Using Searchandiser, a third party tool powered by the GSA, we can build out webpages with similar products, at all price points, that show up whenever a customer does a relevant search.

Search times have been reduced and slowdowns have become a thing of the past. In our business, search that’s fast and on-target has a direct impact on customer loyalty. That means GSA will help keep our customers finding and buying products they need, and associating Prima Supply with easy searching and fast service.

Google Search Appliance gets an update with version 7.2

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Posted by Brent VerWeyst, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Your company has a wealth of collective knowledge and data, but how quickly can employees or customers find the right information? Google Search Appliance (GSA) gives businesses a simple way to search all their content, no matter where it lives or what format it’s in. Today we’re adding new capabilities to GSA with version 7.2, making it even easier to find documents, organize your data and let your team focus on what really matters: getting things done.

Entity management gets easier
GSA 7.0 introduced entity recognition, which helps businesses categorize unstructured content by extracting entities—attributes like date, author and product type—from documents. With GSA 7.2, you get a chance to test and tweak your entities before indexing begins. This helps ensure that the entities you choose and apply will work best for your organization’s needs.

Helping to make search more universal
Companies rely on GSA to make all their files discoverable from a single search box, no matter where they live. It does this with the help of components called connectors, which link GSA to various data sources and index their contents. In GSA 7.2, we’ve made the connector framework more scalable and flexible. Customers and partners can develop and improve custom connectors more easily, helping GSA become a truly universal information hub.

More search, less typing
Relevant results shouldn’t rely on exact queries—especially when you’re dealing with long product names or technical data. Say you’re searching for part number 3728. With GSA 7.2, instead of struggling to remember the exact part number, you can type in “part number 37” plus a wildcard character such as an * to execute the query. With wildcard search, you don’t have to memorize complicated terms to find what you need.

In addition to these features, GSA 7.2 also introduces a redesigned admin console, improved language support and advanced sorting. To upgrade your GSA software, login to the Google Support Portal and download the release beginning at 9:00 am PT today.

To find out more about Google Search Appliance, click here.

Charles Stanley Direct invests in GSA to transform customer experience

Monday, January 20, 2014

Posted by Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Ed Lecky-Thompson, Head of Digital at Charles Stanley Direct, a leading online investment site and part of the Charles Stanley Group, which has £18bn of investments under management. To learn more, join our Hangout with Charles Stanley Direct on January 23rd. Register here: http://goo.gl/A23N59

As a direct-to-client investment service, our website plays an absolutely critical role in attracting and retaining customers. While we’ve won a number of awards for the quality of our customer service and online trading platform, we realized our site's search functionality was in need of an upgrade.
Clients use our site to search for and view information on funds and stocks to help them weigh their investment decisions. However, Google Analytics showed that between 35-45% of client searches on the site resulted in no matches at all, while 15% of searches came back with thousands of potential results, meaning the right ones were often buried. Search was one of the last tasks clients performed before leaving the site altogether, showing the frustrations they experience in being unable to find what they were looking for.

To tackle these problems in-house would have proved costly and time-consuming, so we looked at a number of hosted providers. When our Google partner Extended Content Solutions Limited demoed the Google Search Appliance (GSA) using our own data, we saw instantly how it would benefit us.

Features like Intelligent Re-Direct enable customers searching, for example, for a subsidiary company to be re-directed immediately to the name of its parent company, which is what you’d actually trade shares in. The Spell Suggestions feature makes searching much faster. The GSA’s Query Expansion feature also provides clients with additional relevant results when they search for certain products or funds, meaning that they are presented with more investment options. Best of all, the GSA was so easy to integrate with our existing systems that we were up and running within a month.

Since deploying the GSA, feedback from our customers has been fantastic. Now, only 5% of searches result in zero matches or an unmanageable number of results, compared with 65% beforehand. We have a 99% click through rate, showing us that users are finding the fund or stock they’re looking for on their first search, whereas previously only 20% of searches actually generated a click-through to view that share or fund. Calls to our contact centre relating to finding information on stocks and funds on the site almost disappeared overnight. The next step for us is adding the ability for customers to search for our videos, which give up-to-date and insightful information on market trends. It’s exciting to think though that we’ve probably only scratched the surface of all the potential the GSA has to offer and how we can use it.

In the months since we’ve deployed the GSA we’ve improved customer retention and acquisition and increased the conversion rates of website traffic to client registrations. As the site goes from strength-to-strength it has paid for itself a number of times over. It is no exaggeration to say that the GSA has completely transformed the role the website plays within our business.

Google Apps and Google Search Appliance help University College Dublin students and faculty stay informed

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Posted by Brian Morrissey, Head of Web Services, IT Services department at University College Dublin

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Brian Morrissey, Head of Web Services, IT Services at University College Dublin, Ireland’s largest university. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

University College Dublin is the largest university in Ireland and one of Europe’s leading research universities. Founded in 1854, UCD has 6,000 staff and more than 30,000 students. Being able to get accurate information quickly, even when on the go, is important for faculty and students in a highly competitive learning environment. Google Apps and Google Search Appliance are helping us stay connected and informed.

Before Google, we weren’t always able to respond to service issues quickly, particularly if they happened on the weekend when IT administrators were off work. Google’s tools make service issues less frequent and easier to manage when they occur. Because we don’t have all that hardware and software to manage, we can now focus our IT staff on bringing new services to the UCD community. These include collaborative and communications services such as Google Plus and Hangouts, together with improved services through UCD Connect and UCD Mobile.

The ability to integrate Google Calendar and Drive with Gmail was another huge benefit for us. The big game changer for us is Google Calendar. We’re delivering class schedules and other events to students directly in their calendars, so they are easy to update and accessible via mobile devices. With 40,000 smartphones and tablets on the UCD network this is key to helping students make it to class on time.

In addition to Google Apps, UCD is using Google Search Appliance to make all of its publicly available documents searchable through its website, and internal documents searchable by university staff on the intranet. More than 500,000 documents are in the index and people are conducting more than 60,000 searches per month. We’ve implemented numerous custom search display pages and targeted directory searches with specific keywords to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

Google’s initial appeal was service availability, coupled with storage improvements, easy mobile access and cost savings. We’re saving about $330,000 a year that would have been spent on servers, maintenance, personnel and power to manage the previous email system, SunMail. Storage was a big concern for us before going Google. We had about eight terabytes of staff emails alone and were always worried that we’d run out of storage and have to buy more. Now, each person has seven times more storage for mail and concerns about exceeding quotas have disappeared. Through the use of Google Apps and Search Appliance, UCD now has a scalable solution for mail, collaboration and search which drives better communication, collaboration and information retrieval throughout our university.

Opening up the rich history and heritage of the Thai Parliament Library with Google Search Appliance

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Posted by Dr. Adisak Sukul, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, KMITL

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dr. Adisak Sukul, Ph.D., from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, KMITL. Dr. Sukul served as a consultant on the working group to develop Thailand’s largest Digital Library of legislative documents. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

The Parliament of Thailand houses over 350,000 pieces of journals, newspapers, e-books and videos, some dating back from as early as 1932 ‒ the year Thailand’s Constitution began. Over the years, the amount of information we accumulated grew substantially and we sought a powerful system that would help us manage the repository effectively. This culminated in the development of Thailand’s largest Digital Library, where the repository of legislative documents was made available for public referencing over the Web.

The Digital Library collated various document collections from different research libraries into a single searchable archive. We also developed a search engine to help users locate information but we found that the engine was not generating accurate search results due to the complexity of the Thai language. The problem was further compounded by the multitude of complex official documents with several different metadata structures. Users had to run 10 different search queries in order to retrieve the complete information they were looking for. It became evident that a more efficient and user-friendly solution was needed if we wanted members of the public to gain value from the National Assembly’s collection.

Google Search Appliance (GSA) met our requirements perfectly. It integrates easily with our back-end database solution and the information from multiple platforms is now consolidated and condensed into one single repository. It is simple to use and delivers complete and accurate search results to users. Now, users can conduct searches 10 times faster than they used to.

The GSA is also equipped with a built-in dictionary that intelligently recognizes the Thai language. The GSA’s auto complete and spell checker are incredibly useful for us. The Thai language is complex, and it is not uncommon for words to be misspelled. We knew that working with the Thai language on a search engine can be highly challenging, but Google’s dedicated team worked hard to ensure that this was not a barrier to the success of our project.

Once the system went live to the public, Google’s easy-to-use interface attracted many new users to the Digital Library. This was a plus point for us as we have been receiving increasing requests for access to non-sensitive legislative-related information. I am pleased that we are now able to share this repository of knowledge with lawyers, students and non-governmental organizations. To date, the Library has logged a 200 percent increase in user traffic.

We also noticed that searches conducted using Google.com or other search engines will point to documents in the Digital Library. This means that we are now reaching out to more people. It is gratifying to know that we are finally able to share and put to good use the rich history and heritage we have stored over the years.

Throughout the project, Google’s Enterprise team and Google’s Developer Group were supportive and professional. In fact, it was this open working relationship that helped ensure the project’s success. Thanks to Google, we now empower our searchers with a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips.

Speedway Motors Serves Up Fast Results with Google Search Appliance

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Posted by Chris Chance, Director of IT, Speedway Motors

Editor's note: Today’s blog post is from Chris Chance, Director of IT at Speedway Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of street rod and racing products. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say – and watch the recent Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors and Google Enterprise.

For a business that’s based on speed, we had to admit that our Speedway Motors website search was rather slow. That’s not acceptable for a company that’s on the fast track: We fill thousands of orders a week, and our website gets more than 500,000 unique visitors every month. The solution to the speed problem was Google Search Appliance, which fueled faster search for Speedway and also drove big increases in conversions and revenue.

Our previous search product, Mercado’s e-Commerce search and merchandising suite (now Adobe® Search&Promote), didn’t just go slow on delivering results: It took 10 hours a week to manually tune results and build workarounds. But even with all that work, search results took as long as four seconds to appear. We started to realize that our competitors all had better search functionality than we did. Exit Mercado, enter Google Search Appliance.

With more than 60,000 products, many of which have unique names that require inputting for synonyms and alternate keywords, we expected a long implementation. We were wrong – it took just a few weeks. Now that feeds are automatic, we spend only 10 minutes a week checking search results.

Now Speedway Motors really is speedy: Customers typically receive search results in 500 milliseconds, a performance improvement that contributed to a 45% increase in our conversion rate, and a 116% increase in search-attributed revenue. The Google Search Appliance is giving back to our customers and our Ecommerce team – customers are able to quickly find the parts they need and the reduction in search maintenance allows our Ecommerce team to spend more team focusing on what matters – helping our customers build their dream cars.

Hangout On Air: Speedway Motors Builds a Better Storefront with Google Search Appliance

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Posted by Meghdutt Brahmachari, Product Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

No wonder the customers of Speedway Motors love the retailer so much. The world’s largest manufacturer of specialty hot-rodding and racing products is using Google Search Appliance (GSA) to help car-racing fanatics quickly find and buy the hard-to-find parts they need from among thousands of items. Fast, relevant search creates loyal customers, including a handful who have been getting their parts from Speedway Motors for more than 30 years.

In our upcoming Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors - taking place Thursday, September 19th at 10 a.m. PT - you can hear Chris Chance, Speedway’s Director of IT, chat with Joe Davidoff, North American Sales Manager for Google Commerce Search. Also, Dwayne Remekie, Practice Director for enterprise solutions consultant GroupBy, will show a demo of GroupBy's product that uses Google’s relevance model to provide a best-in-class merchandising tool that integrates with GSA.

Chris and Joe will talk about the role that Google Search Appliance plays in the Speedway customer service story, and Chris will also share his insights on these questions:

How has better search helped Speedway increase conversions by 45%, and boost search revenue by 116%?
Why is search relevance so important to customers?
What search features help customers quickly find the products they need?

If you missed our previous Hangout On Air with Ocado, the world’s largest online grocer, you can catch up on the details.

RSVP for the Speedway Motors Hangout On Air, and take part in the Q&A by posting your questions on Google+ or Twitter using the the hashtag #GoneGoogle.

Global IT business gets up to speed with Google Search Appliance

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Posted by Posted by Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware, an international application delivery and security applications provider for virtual and cloud data centers, headquartered in Israel. The company has 10,000 customers across the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Radware, we help over 10,000 companies around the world assess and manage everything from Business Intelligence to Customer Relationship Management to Enterprise Resource Planning. Our customers use our tools as a core part of their strategy for adapting to market challenges, maintaining business continuity and keeping costs down. But navigating these complex products requires our help and support. So we offer a database of over 2,000 Q&As, known as Knowledge Base, to assist in solving different problems, along with telephone and online support.

Until recently, it was a slow process for customers to find what they were looking for in this vast pool of data. If they didn’t type the exact phrase that was listed in the Knowledge Base database, the necessary results would not always appear. We also struggled internally to navigate the search options. Even in my role as Knowledge Base Manager, I sometimes found it quicker to use Google’s regular web search than our own database.

When looking at alternatives, we were blown away by the accuracy and speed of Google’s enterprise search technology, the Google Search Appliance. DoIT International helped us to set up the GSA and now the results of all searches are 400% to 800% faster than before. All results appear in less than a second, compared to the response time of at least 4 seconds with our previous technology. In 70% of the searches, no further queries are performed and there are no 'next page' clicks, so we know people are finding what they need at the top of the page.

We’re confident that our customers are getting the help and support they need in the timeframe they expect. What’s more, we’re using GSA’s analytics to build out our database. If we spot lots of customers searching for the same thing, we add a new result or ‘how to’ guide or use the feedback to identify and address an issue before it has even been officially logged. All thanks to the speed, accuracy and ease of use of the GSA.

Hays scouts out the top talent using Google Search Appliance 7.0

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Posted by Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment, which is a leading global expert in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment. Hays is an international recruitment agency with 7,800 staff in 245 offices across 33 countries, and has recently expanded into Chile, Colombia and Malaysia. See what other organizations that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

The recruitment industry is incredibly competitive. Often we win business when our recruitment consultants are able to get the best CVs to our clients faster than our competitors. We rely heavily on our contact databases so that we can match the best candidates to job vacancies.

At Hays, we have over 20 million archived documents and we receive 30,000 new CVs a day. With our old search system, CVs had to be categorised into databases and manually tagged. This held up the process of them entering the system, so our consultants couldn’t access them straight away. Consultants also had to learn specific codes to return the results they wanted, which made the whole process very time consuming.

To fix this problem we chose to implement the Google Search Appliance 7.0 (GSA). Not only does it integrate seamlessly with our internal database, but it also automatically indexes CVs. This means that our recruitment consultants have access to the most up to date candidates at all times and our IT team no longer has to spend hours manually indexing information. Since adopting GSA, our IT team have reduced the time they spend on search by 90%. Our recruitment consultants have also become more efficient because they're able to search across multiple databases in a second's time. Since the GSA is intuitive for a young workforce that is used to seamless consumer search, we also now save hours and thousands of pounds in training every year.

GSA 7.0 gives us the ability to automatically translate CVs and job specs through Google Translate. It is easier for us to compete in global markets, finding the best candidates within a global talent pool who may have previously been missed in the sea of information. For example, roles within the oil and gas industry are typically scattered around the world so it's far easier for us to match relevant candidates now that we have access to the Translate tool.

The global search capabilities of the GSA have also led to a cultural shift. Whereas previously there was a tendency to hoard the best candidates within specific databases, which only select recruitment consultants would be searching, now the candidate database is completely open so no single recruitment agent ‘owns’ the candidates within it.

These benefits have meant we’re now looking to use the GSA across all of our websites globally, making it easier and quicker for job seekers to find the right roles. After rolling this out in the UK and Ireland we found bounce rates have been dramatically reduced, meaning more people are finding the jobs they need from the site.

Google Enterprise’s search technology has fundamentally improved our business. It has put us firmly ahead of our competitors, making us more profitable and allowing us to expand internationally into new markets.

Macomb County protects the American Dream of homeownership

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Posted by Crystal Brenner, Administrative Assistant, Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Crystal Brenner, Administrative Assistant for the Macomb County Clerk / Register of Deeds. See what other organizations that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

Last year, Macomb County set out to improve public real estate search, to help property owners reduce the risk of real estate fraud, and make it easier for Macomb County property owners to protect their property rights. Along the way we may have created one of the nation's best and perhaps one of the first high-tech real estate records search and fraud detection tools. We were inspired to act by a CBS 60 Minutes exposé uncovering crucial ownership documents for real estate throughout the nation that are often bogus or even nonexistent.

In the past, Macomb County property records were available on paper or online in an electronic format that only allowed searching on a few, limited fields, such as owner name or property description, indexed differently throughout the years. Inconsistent indexing is an issue for registers of deeds throughout the nation, and it points to the need for a search solution that can find stored electronic deeds with ease.

In partnership with Xerox, we set out to do better and help owners detect potential fraud. We scanned every Macomb County real estate record - millions of public records, from dirt to present day. Because we wanted an intuitive, familiar search interface that would let us look quickly through millions of documents, we immediately chose the Google Search Appliance.

Called the “Super Index,” we launched a public prototype in September 2012. The Super Index currently includes millions of pages of public Macomb County real estate documents, going back all the way to 1818. And each year, we’ll add more than 180,000 new documents.

Users can search the Super Index at no charge. What makes it “super” is that searches may now include all recognized text on the documents, including witness and notary names. Once an individual finds the documents they’re looking for, and reviews a thumbnail to be sure it’s what they need, we either provide a link or send a PDF file of those public documents for $6 per document.

One user said, “This is great stuff! Once again, the Macomb County Clerk/Register of Deed’s office is providing the public with a useful tech-savvy resource to gain easy access to public information, with the convenience [of access] from one’s home or office.”

For many people, owning a home is a key part of the American Dream, and we wanted to give our citizens in Macomb the power to protect that dream. We took bold action to combat fraud and educate homeowners about their rights and property. With help from Xerox and the Google Search Appliance, Macomb County is making the search for the American Dream a little easier.

Join us for a Google Hangout On Air on April 24, 2013 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST to see for yourself how the Google Search Appliance is making a difference in our city.

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