Eniro – Serving 8 million users a month
In May 2008 Eniro Super Search was launched. Super Search is a new search that is highly integrated and intelligent, giving relevant hits from all of Eniro’s search services in one place. It helps users navigate through services and verticals in a more intuitive way. To build this new service, technology from Apptus has been essential.
It all started back in 2001. Eniro was the first Swedish site to offer Yellow Pages on the web (the first version was launched in 1996). Eniro gave Apptus the task of building a high-performance search platform to improve relevance and response time, with a target of enabling 8 million users per month to find and interact with 700,000 businesses in Scandinavia. “We started by analyzing the website’s future demands,” explains Michael Mokhberi, VP Strategic Business Development at Apptus. “Eniro had very high expectations for the future. To kick-off the process, we began with an intensive strategic planning phase. We interviewed key stakeholders, operations and marketing and sales departments. Then we evaluated their technology infrastructure and the complexity of various parts of the existing platform. We suggested a completely new infrastructure based on the Apptus Platform for Search and Content Enrichment. This strategic planning phase led to our first contract – building the Eniro White Pages, which was a major success. “An essential factor for the successful result was the perfection of the site performance and reduction of the response time by a factor of more than 100, from seconds to milliseconds. Another major benefit was the replacement of a traditional database environment with a much more cost-efficient Linux environment. Thanks to the results for the White Pages, Eniro trusted Apptus with the rebuilding of their main online business – Sweden’s Yellow Pages. Following this Apptus has then made constant improvements of different aspects of the site.
Super Search for the people
The latest addition in Eniro’s offering is the Super Search that’s all built by Eniro in-house staff. The Eniro team has used the powerful search platform from Apptus using the capabilities that give search developers productivity, performance, control and high uptime. Super Search shows search results for the business directory, white pages, maps, images, videos and news integrated into one page.
Through an integrated hit list, Super Search makes it possible to search quicker, get a better overview and inspiration for deeper searches. With a single “Super Search” the user gets all the information available on the Yellow Pages and White Pages with the hits shown directly on a map. The hit result also shows maps, images, videos, news and other information available on the web in relation to the search word. With Super Search it’s easier for the user to search for anything and get a really good overview of the result straight away.
One common platform for the future
Today Eniro has an improved common search platform for Sweden, Denmark and Finland based on the Apptus Theca™ platform. Apptus designed the common platform to handle different languages, business models and increased data volumes without compromising on performance, supporting Eniro’s decision to invest in more searchable data requiring far more advanced search logic than previously. Common search solutions don’t usually offer more than standard functions such as handling misspellings, synonyms and stemming. At Eniro we introduced Waterfall search – a powerful technology sorting the most relevant results based on combinations of business logic, ranking, word relevance and search behaviour. Behind the scenes the Apptus Search Engine performs hundreds of search queries until all relevant combinations, exceptions and irregularities have been explored and handled. At the same time the user receives relevant results found in many sources and presented in an intuitive way.
“Users should not have to think too much before performing a search, but should get relevant results from multiple sources,” says Christer Pettersson, Online Manager for Eniro’s search services.
At Eniro users get an extensive search experience that makes it possible to search in great detail and receive highly relevant hits. A big improvement for the Eniro site has been the possibility to provide search functions in maps. If location is more important than the name of the restaurant, the Apptus platform supports search within a certain geographic area. This means that finding restaurants close to Stockholm Castle is an easy match for Eniro today.
“The common platform is one of the foundations of our success,” says Christer Pettersson. “I’m impressed by Apptus’ ability to integrate new solutions and adjust to ever-changing market conditions within the search and directory industry.”
The proof is in the pudding – www.eniro.se
