Photon’s Innovation in Web 2.0
About the Customer
The client is the leading professional sports organization with over 200,000 members in various roles.
Their mission is to achieve leadership in the golf industry through creating efficiency, and to increase productivity gains through intelligent use of technology. The client’s requirements were multi phased and the first phase was to make an advanced web crawler and search engine that allows users to access information across various clients’ websites from one central location.
Need For The Solution
The Solution
Photon worked on a Road map as stated below:
- Gather the key system requirements to gain a better understanding of the client’s functional vision
- Take this vision of a search engine that integrates information from multiple sites and turn it into a technical end result
- Customize “Nutch” search engine to perform both web and directory crawling across crawl configurations that span multiple sites
- Develop interfaces to manage the site configurations, categories of information, crawl configurations, and the look and feel of the search engine
- Create a Facebook page and OpenSocial widgets to popularize the websites
- Plan and implement the system integration with client’s existing systems and ensure minimal disruption to employees and users
- The system was fully functioning six weeks after the project’s initiation date
The Key Results
Visitors to any of the client’s sites can now perform a regular or advanced search of all available information on all the sites within seconds. The search is structured not only to crawl the sites but to make the most of their complicated infrastructure. Rather than letting that structure become a hindrance to search efficiency, the crawler uses it to enhance the search functionality. The end result not only saves valuable time for all users, but also allows them to access information that they might never have been aware of had they not been able to search for it. The sites are so expansive that some form of internal search was needed in order to truly take advantage of all the valuable content therein, and the Nutch customized web crawler went beyond the need for search functionality to take full advantage of the material at hand. Despite the complexity of the solution, it was up and running within weeks.
The Facebook widgets increased traffic to the site by several times.