Archive: User Stories

Quick Links in Action

Northwestern University
www.northwestern.edu

Quick Links are a great way to direct users to our affiliated sites. For example, if you search for "oyez" at www.northwestern.edu, you receive a link to a site that contains multimedia content from the United States Supreme Court. We use Ultraseek's reporting tools to identify top queries with no clickthrough for more Quick Link ideas.

Adam Finlayson, Web developer

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
www.slac.stanford.edu

First, I create a URL such as http://www-search.slac.stanford.edu:8765/cs.html?url=http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/cafe/&qt=clickthrough&col=quicklink&n=0. This URL serves as a Quick Link, linking directly to our employee cateteria menu. Specific keywords such as 'cafe' are associated with it. The URL also causes the link to show up in my Top Requested Documents report so I can see if the user is accessing the page via the Quick Link or the search result. On this report, I can easily compare the keywords in the Quick Link and in the search query to augment the Quick Link keyword list as needed.

Due to a very convoluted set of authentication schemes and a variety of Web servers, we do not yet have our public and intranet search collections integrated. As a result, our internal users tend to use our public search page. I've set up Quick Links to the main intranet Web sites and the Quick Links to appear on our public search results. I can control what is displayed in the Quick Link description to ensure it does not contain any sensitive information. Some users may be prompted for a login when then use the link.

I've reformatted the Quick Link so it looks fairly distinctive on the search results page.
Use the search box at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ and try 'cafe' or 'security' to see these effects.

Ruth McDunn, Web Information Manager

Posted January 13, 2006 by editor

'Richer Suite of Functionality'

Harish Amin, Founder of Omniware Consulting, discusses his organization's role in the selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on the State of Wisconsin's public website at www.wisconsin.gov.

What business challenges prompted the State of Wisconsin to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
Prior to the implementation of the Ultraseek software in 1999, the State of Wisconsin had been using a very basic, almost home grown search solution on its public websites. Someone wrote a Perl script that scanned through our documents. It wasn't reliable at all. As contractors to the State of Wisconsin, Omniware Consulting recommended that the State's Web properties standardize on a richer suite of functionality for statewide search to help citizens locate relevant information faster.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
We downloaded Ultraseek for a 30-day evaluation, and had it up and running within a day. Over the years, it's been extremely straightforward to implement the new releases of Ultraseek. Most of our configurations are fairly simple. We take two boxes, install the newer version on one box and point the search to that and it'd be running in a half a day. We normally perform our updates during a Saturday maintenance window.

How is Ultraseek used at the State of Wisconsin?
Verity Ultraseek and the Content Classification Engine module are used on the State's public website (www.wisconsin.gov). Our site averages approximately 50,000 search queries a day. We have about 750,000 documents indexed across virtually every agency, board, commission and department in the state including the Office of the Governor, the Department of Revenue and many more. Each agency customizes the user interface and result pages according to their own standards.

What Ultraseek feature could your client not do without? Why?
There are many valuable features inside Ultraseek. As an example, the Department of Public Instruction's Reference and Loan Library makes extensive use of Ultraseek topics, reporting tools and Quick Links to more effectively respond to the requests for information from their end-users.

What has fast, relevant, easy to maintain search meant for www.wisconsin.gov?
As easy as Ultraseek is to install and maintain, the citizens of our state benefit the most from an effective search experience on www.wisconsin.gov. They are able to find where to pay their taxes, get their fishing license and more effectively conduct business with the State. This has been validated by the positive comments we receive in surveys about the user experience on the State of Wisconsin's public sites.

Posted November 17, 2005 by editor

'Better Search Results'

Rick Sleppy, Webmaster for Engenio Information Technologies, discusses his company's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on www.engenio.com.

What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
At the recommendation of our Web design firm, we implemented a low-end search solution when we initially launched our website about a year ago. Our intent was to upgrade to a more robust solution in the coming year. But, when we went live with our new website it became painfully obvious that users were not finding our search solution adequate. We saw a large number of visitors exit our site from search queries because the search results were so poor. The adage "you get what you pay for" sure rang true in this case.

Our parent company, LSI Logic, was very high on Ultraseek, having used the solution for several years. We naturally put Ultraseek at the top of our list when we looked for a new, robust solution to replace our corner-cutting alternative. If we had to do it all over again, we would have implemented Ultraseek from the beginning to spare ourselves from losing repeat traffic to our website.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
Rolling our Ultraseek was fairly simple. Our Web administrator, who had no experience installing a search solution previously, had no trouble figuring out how to implement Ultraseek. With minimal resources dedicated to the implementation, Engenio rolled out the new search engine in about a month. However, if it wasn't for the very complex Web design built into the search results page, we would have been able to launch Ultraseek in a week or so as the setup required very little time at all.

How is Ultraseek used at Engenio Information Technologies?
We use Ultraseek on our public website, www.engenio.com. Our site averages approximately 100 search queries a day. We have nearly 1,000 Web pages and/or documents indexed and Ultraseek handles our website effortlessly.

What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
There isn't one feature that stands out as being more important than others. I have a hard time seeing Ultraseek as a feature set, but rather as a turn-key solution, a tightly integrated, complete search solution. So in a few words, I think all the features are must-haves. We have yet to find any key feature missing, which is not something you can say about many solutions.

What has fast, relevant, easy to maintain search meant for www.engenio.com?
Since we implemented Ultraseek about four months ago, we have seen a significant, incremental improvement in the reduction of users that exit our site immediately after doing a search query. This was a problem prior to implementing Ultraseek. We firmly believe that Ultraseek is the reason behind this improvement because users are finding what they are looking for during their search queries.

Previously, users were so frustrated with the inadequate search results they were getting from our low-end search solution that they just bailed from our website. Now, they are finding what they are looking for.

Additionally, we have noticed an increase in the pages viewed per visitor since we implemented Ultraseek. Again, we attribute this to Ultraseek providing better search results and users sticking around longer on our website because they find what they are looking for.

Posted October 21, 2005 by editor

'More than Just a Search Tool'

Ken Moody, Web Specialist at Columbia Credit Union, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on its intranet and public website at www.columbiacu.org.

What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
On our public website at www.columbiaacu.org, we were using the native IIS indexing tool for search. On our intranet, we had no viable search solution at all. For both, Columbia Credit Union needed a solution that could efficiently index a wide variety of documents, in particular, .pdf and MS Office documents. Ultraseek does a terrific job of indexing these and other file formats.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
We were able to implement Ultraseek in just a few hours. Configuration was a breeze. Never has an installation gone as smoothly as Ultraseek! We are a fairly small shop, so ongoing administration must be minimal. Ultraseek continues to run flawlessly, and requires virtually no administrative maintenance.

How is Ultraseek used at Columbia Credit Union?
Currently, Ultraseek is used for enterprise search on our intranet. More than 225 employees use it to find information stored throughout our 3,000-document intranet. On our public website, Ultraseek has not only improved the ability of our members to quickly locate product and service information, but it has become a key in creating Web visibiility for promotions.

What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
The ability to create custom search results with the Quick Links feature is an invaluable tool. When Quick Links is combined with Ultraseek's excellent reporting capabilities, we can tailor specific responses to help maximize the effectiveness of the search tool. These customized responses are now a key component of our overall marketing strategy.

What has fast, relevant, easy to maintain search meant to Columbia Credit Union?
On our intranet, employees spend far less time searching because they are able to locate the forms and information they need without hunting through numerous pages. On our public website, Ultraseek helps us offer an improved user experience for our members. We can also better drive our marketing strategies by delivering promotional Quick Links based on related search topics. Ultraseek is more than just a search tool; it is a valuable vehicle for expanding product awareness and driving promotional strategies.

Posted October 04, 2005 by editor

'Everything Indexed by Morning'

Jason Cermak, a consultant with Deloitte Consulting, discusses with Ultraseek.com his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek at one of Canada's largest oil and gas corporations.

What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
Deloitte Consulting was hired by a large Canadian oil and gas company to design and implement a corporate portal. This company had an intranet with a freeware search engine that was complex and ineffective. To correct these deficiencies, Deloitte evaluated Ultraseek and selected it as the portal's search engine. We liked the fact that we could actually implement a fully functional search engine while we were evaluating it. Deloitte licensed it for the oil company after 30 days.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
There was little customization, just some configuration for the spider. The spider was set loose during the night and we had everything indexed by morning (approximately 5,000 entries). Ultraseek was fully functional on the go-live date of the portal.

How is Ultraseek used in your client's organization today?
Ultraseek runs on the internal-facing portal. More than 4,000 employees rely on Ultraseek. Approximately 6,000 search queries are performed every day. There are now approximately 8,000 documents indexed. The volume of information is growing rapidly.

What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
Key to Ultraseek is its ease of implementation. We faced the challenge recently of moving our client's portal environment to a new server. Verity's online product key generator allowed us to move Ultraseek over without having to re-purchase a new product key. It was no hassle at all.

What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to your client's enterprise?
Users are definitely more satisfied with the search experience that Ultraseek provides. And, with Ultraseek's search statistic reports, we can be more tuned into what users are looking for and modify site navigation/content accordingly.

Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!

Posted September 28, 2005 by editor

'Affordable and Dependable'

Craig Petrou, a Webmaster at PSECU the financial Link, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek on the public website for Pennsylvania's largest credit union.

What business challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
We were looking for an affordable and dependable search solution, from an established company that could be incorporated fairly easy into our high-traffic public website (www.psecu.com). Prior to incorporating Verity Ultraseek, visitors would navigate our website using menus, hyperlinks and site maps. Visitors can now search for specific keywords, thus, finding specific information they want and need in a fraction of the time.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
Implementation of Verity Ultraseek's XML interface was fairly easy to install, set up, integrate and maintain. Although search capabilities were a year end objective, it took less than a week for a Webmaster to incorporate and a Network Support Engineer to install on our development, staging and production servers.

How is Ultraseek used at PSECU?
We are a $2.2 billion credit union serving 300,000 members throughout the world. We use Verity Ultraseek and the Ultraseek Content Classification Engine on our site to help visitors find the information they need about us and the products and services we offer. Our website gets a lot of traffic. We receive one million hits on our site each month. We also integrated Ultraseek into our current Macromedia Flash-based navigational menu and our RightNow customer relationship management system.

What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
Even though Ultraseek produces great search results out of the box, we like the ability to display specific QuickLink results based upon specific keywords. For example, earlier this year we ran a "beat zero" keyword advertising campaign. By searching for the QuickLink keyword "beat zero", you received a link to a page explaining why it costs more to take an auto manufacturer's 0% APR loan, rather than our 4.99% APR loan with the manufacturer's cash-back rebate. This brought current members, as well as potential members, to our site where we were able to advertised and explain even additional products and services we offer.

What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to PSECU?
At PSECU, we have a self-help philosophy. So, whether you need the most current mortgage rate or advice about setting up payroll direct deposits, we want to help our customers help themselves. Verity Ultraseek enables our visitors and members to find the information they need, when they need it.

Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!

Posted September 19, 2005 by editor

'Administration is a Snap!'

Charles Karnbach, a Senior Web Engineer with United States Department of Justice, discusses his organization's selection and deployment of Verity Ultraseek.

What organizational challenges prompted you to evaluate Verity Ultraseek?
The United States Department of Justice needed a fast, robust, secure, and powerful search engine to replace the one that came standard with our Web server. We researched this choice deeply before making a decision. We had seven vendors from competing companies come and demo their products. Ultraseek was, by far, the most powerful and least expensive application.

Tell us about your Ultraseek implementation experience. How fast did you roll it out?
The rollout was very simple, fast and easy. Within days, we went live on our intranet as well as the intranet servers in 94 Department of Justice district offices across the United States and overseas. With a central server, administration is a snap!

How is Ultraseek used at the U.S. Department of Justice?
It currently indexes about 70,000 documents in a variety of formats including HTML, CFM, PDF, and Word. Over 96 Web servers are being indexed on a single search server. Each district office places a link to their customized search page on our main server. From this link, Department of Justice employees, wherever they are located, can easily access the information they need.

What Ultraseek feature could you not do without? Why?
In our internal surveys, users frequently mention the Ultraseek Search Tips and Examples page as an excellent resource for optimizing their search experience with some of Ultraseek's most advanced features. It helps our users find the information they need faster, rather than turning into trouble tickets on our IT help desk. The man-hours saved are worth tens of thousands of dollars.

What has fast, relevant, easy-to-maintain search meant to the Department of Justice?
More than 9,000 of our users work in the legal area and one of the most important aspects of their jobs is data research. Ultraseek provides an invaluable tool to simplify research. This frees up time for them to perform many of their other tasks. Also, we have been able to save time for over 94 system managers, one at each of our district sites.

Do you have a story to share about how your organization is using Ultraseek? Tell us now and win a prize!

Posted September 13, 2005 by editor

'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.

Archive: User Stories

More Quality Quick Links

Quick Links in Action

'Richer Suite of Functionality'

'Better Search Results'

'More than Just a Search Tool'

'Everything Indexed by Morning'

'Affordable and Dependable'

'Administration is a Snap!'

'Implementation Went So Smoothly'

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