Maximizing User Experience with Federated Search

“Research ‘time-to-answer’ success depends on accelerating information discovery”

Information is of no use if it can’t be found. The research process is time-consuming and complicated. It is impractical for researchers to spend time searching and sifting through thousands of information sources. Automating the repetitive information search is time and cost-efficient.

An effective way to speed up the information access component of research is Faceted Search. Also called guided navigation and faceted navigation, faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that lets users drill into search results by any value in any field. Going a step further, Federated search collects these search results and renders them on one platform.

What is Federated Search?

Federated search, also called cross-platform search, is an information retrieval technology that aggregates multiple channels of information into a single searchable point. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the domains participating in the federation. The federated search then aggregates the results received from the domains for presentation to the user. This means, there’s no need to consult each information resource individually, rather, multiple library catalogues, websites, and subscription databases can be searched instantaneously.

Why cross-platform search is a step ahead of native search?

• It offers a centralized hub of learning for searching group of independent collections, and effectively merging the results from multilingual environments.
• It delivers information that is dynamic, diverse and engaging.
• It streamlines user experience, eradicating the requirement of linking to a third party product interface.
• It retrieves the most up-to-date, real-time information, rather than relying on indexed data that could be out of date.
• It eliminates the effort and expense of indexing all of your searchable content.
• It accesses advanced federated search at an affordable rate.
• It creates SEO benefits as you create dynamic pages that are rich in a given keyword or topic.

Powerful benefits of Federated Search

• Increased customer engagement
• Increased case deflection
• More relevant & quality search results
• Reduced customer service costs
• Time & cost efficient

Technologies used in Federated Search

The following are the different technologies used in building custom Federated Search solution-

• SOLR
• AJAX
• Javascript
• JQuery
• HTML
• Freemarker
• PHP

Federated Search: From Requirements to Implementation

Grazitti created a custom Federated Search solution for Optimizely that helped them streamline their user experience and increase customer engagement. Our solution is fully customizable and scalable, tailor-made according to the business requirements.

Implementing Federated Search requires-

• Lithium instance
• Existing CRM, customer support portal*
• Chosen search technology – SOLR, GSA, ElasticSearch
• Server to host the search platform

Implementation of Federated Search is made easy with our custom federated search menu that includes–

• Synonyms
• Highlighting
• Search suggestions
• Autocomplete
• Facets/Filters
• Sorting by any field
• Click scoring
• Page view scoring
• Keyword boosting
• Multiple-index searching with merged results
• Many powerful query types: phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries, and more
• Third party analytics integration such as page views, likes, comments, and more
• Pluggable ranking models

Want to implement Federated Search to your community?