Search Application Framework

Improving User Experience, Content Findability, and Cutting Costs of Enterprise Search

Enterprise search is often an expensive project; with most time spent on either the search engine software or scoping what and how content needs to be indexed correctly.  Often too little time is spent thinking about the user experience, and the risk is obvious—while the new search has all content ready to be surfaced, the users are overwhelmed with results, or underwhelmed by the experience.

The goal of Semaphore Search Application Framework is to provide a great search experience out of the box by allowing users to tweak and customize to meet application specification requirements with minimal development effort.

What is the Search Application Framework?

The Semaphore Search Application Framework is an out-of-the-box interface that encapsulates search best practices and can sit over Microsoft FAST, Google Search Appliance or Apache Solr search indexes with zero programming. It is implemented on a technology platform that sits as a layer abstracted from the search engine itself.

The Search Application Framework is a collection of web services and tag libraries that exposes core functionality like search results, relevance/date ranking, etc. with the advanced Semaphore capability of taxonomy or entity-based facet navigators, topic maps and filters, and more.  The code is provided as a fully functioning application that uses the application processors to hook the interface into the native workflow of several search engines.

Delivering the Findability Promise

Enterprise search applications come with a sample interface – some XSLT code, a few ASP.NET pages. Does your organization have the skills and capacity to develop a compelling search for your users?Enter

Buy versus Build?

Every organization has different mixes of skills and resources, but here are two contrasting customer experiences:

• A membership society with 150,000 members and supported by a web-savvy business analysts installed the Semaphore Search Application Framework on a Friday and went live with a new interface over their Solr index on Sunday.
• A large government organization, who had built their intranet using the Google Search Appliance, dedicated a team of four developers, very knowledgeable in GSA APIs, to extend this search interface to incorporate Semaphore Search Application Framework.  This development took three months because it was very involved.