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Funnelback spoke to Stratos Filalithis, the Head of Website & Communication Technologies. The team is part of the University’s Information Services Group, one of three such professional services groups established to support the function, strategy, and delivery of excellence in teaching and research at the University of Edinburgh. The team is responsible for managing and developing web services, including the nearly 50,000-page University website.
The Website & Communication Technologies team had a strong vision for search. “It needed to follow an enterprise search-type approach,” said Stratos Filalithis, who spearheaded the project. “The end goal is to have a search that’s easy to access, helps audiences to complete their task as quickly as possible, and catalogs all the useful and related data content that is at the University.” The search would be much wider than website content alone, and tap into all available data. Search, in the end, would present people with an excellent solution to achieve their objectives as prospects, students, faculty, staff or alumni.
The University had utilised paid Google site search solutions for a number of years. Looking for more than a like-for-like replacement, they issued a procurement exercise to identify a superior solution that could connect to multiple sources and fulfil the search vision set forth in Objectives (above).
Funnelback had the knowledge and experience, especially in the higher education arena, to fulfil the objectives of the search team. And Funnelback could achieve their vision across multiple properties. “We estimate that we have nearly one million pieces of content just across all our subdomains, not counting other data needed to achieve our vision,” commented Filalithis. The whole University presence encompasses roughly 1,500 websites, including the EdWeb CMS built atop Drupal that forms the basis of their core sites, and many have differing content standards, underlying systems, and metadata quality.
To achieve the objectives of the team, other services were integrated into Funnelback: staff and contact databases, course directories, research information (access to the PURE database was critical) and more.
Though many services weren’t designed with enterprise access in mind, “we haven’t deviated from the vision at all,” Filalithis notes. “When we first implemented Funnelback, the priority was to replace what we had. But since then, we’ve looked at things we didn’t have before.” The University has integrated degrees and programs, blogs, contact databases, and created facets and tabs to distinguish between formats. And they haven’t stopped exploring new ideas as the value of effective Funnelback search has been realised again and again.
“People now ask how they could use Funnelback to search across other services,” Filalithis says with pride. For example, he’s recently answered questions about replacing Microsoft SharePoint’s built-in search with Funnelback.
"We couldn’t have done anything like this without the reporting capabilities of Funnelback...With Google it wasn’t even a possibility. That extra insight from Funnelback is extremely, extremely critical.” - Stratos Filathisis
Squiz Scotland, a Funnelback partner, worked closely with the University of Edinburgh to achieve their objectives. Heavy Drupal users, the University relies on the power of Funnelback to unite their data effectively.
The University introduced search auditing techniques to ensure quality across their new tool. On a roughly monthly basis, the team picks the three to five hundred top terms from their Funnelback search analytics. They look at the top five search results for each term, assessing whether the most desirable result is appearing near the top, then create a report that indicates, for top terms, how search is performing.
Based on these reports, a number of changes have been made to fine-tune the search system. Utilising the analytics and insights from Funnelback, including SEO auditor, the University removed all but the highest-priority sites from the index, surfacing only content from the homepage. “This creates a much better experience for the user, and we couldn’t have done anything like this without the reporting capabilities of Funnelback,” Filalithis notes. “That wasn’t available in any other platform. With Google it wasn’t even a possibility. That extra insight from Funnelback is extremely, extremely critical.”
The University’s Funnelback search instance just “keeps getting better,” Filalithis says. The solution, launched in 2018, has slowly enabled additional Funnelback features so the solution doesn’t disrupt existing search patterns. Filalithis’ team closely monitors search performance, a KPI for their search solution. A long-term success factor is the additional capabilities provided by integrating with other services.
Some of the credit for a successful implementation goes to a multi-year effort to adhere to structured content tagging from schema.org. “When the time was ripe for better search, we were able to just index this data and it just worked. During a Funnelback demo early on, Funnelback had already picked up a lot of the metadata structure and was already showing what we wanted to see,” reports Filalithis. This made implementation of Funnelback capabilities like autocomplete even easier.
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