'Implementation Went So Smoothly'
Marsha Luevane, Search Engine Manager at U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, sits down to discuss her organization's selection, use and longtime loyalty towards Ultraseek.
How long has the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory been using Ultraseek technology?
We've been using this software since 1997 when we installed it, to our amazement, in a couple of hours. We actually thought we had done something wrong because the implementation process went so smoothly.
Where is Ultraseek used today in your organization?
We have Ultraseek deployed on our employee intranet and two major public websites (www.nrel.gov and www.eere.energy.gov). Last year, our users made more than 2 million searches with Ultraseek across 128,000 documents.
Why did you choose Ultraseek?
A number of the Ultraseek capabilities are important to NREL. We needed a search engine that can index all of our document formats. About 15,000 of our most important documents are in PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. Ultraseek indexes these beautifully. We needed a search engine that handles natural language queries effectively. We needed a search engine that can perform field searches, find similar documents, and stemming. Ultraseek met all of these criteria.
What are some of your best Ultraseek search examples?
There are several ways Ultraseek simplifies the search experience. Visitors to www.eere.energy.gov can easily narrow their search from more than 30,000 pages across hundreds of separate websites. For example, someone researching 'electricity generation' can use Ultraseek's scoped search capability to find relevant documents inside only EERE's Distributed Energy Program site. Alternatively, they can broaden their search to find information on 'electricity generation' across all of www.eere.energy.gov.
Ultraseek's Spell Suggest feature is also widely used because there are so many technical terms on www.nrel.gov and www.eere.energy.gov. For example, a user who types in the search query 'photovoltiacs' automatically gets the correct spelling suggested, 'photovoltaics.' This is an excellent feature.
How do you use Ultraseek's Reporting Manager capabilities?
The search logs are a goldmine. They give us an idea of what our users are looking for and the terms they are entering in searches. We use this very valuable information for content development, search engine optimization and site information architecture. The information has been used to support the decisions we make about our sites.
How much work goes on behind the scenes to keep Ultraseek running smoothly at NREL?
The NREL is a one-person search management shop, just me, so administration has to be extremely easy, if not automatic. Ultraseek provides the tools to make automatic additions, deletions, and revisiting. It is also easy to manually add documents on demand, easy to get stats of documents and selectively re-index sites.
Posted July 14, 2005 07:54 AM by editor
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