Case Study:Mediafin Fast websearch

As part of its efforts to enhance quality, Mediafin, the publisher of these newspapers, decided to introduce FAST on its news websites, www.tijd.be  and www.lecho.be, making it the first Belgian media company to select this search engine.  The revamped news websites of De Tijd and L’Echo were launched on 22 May. The project was aimed in part at providing readers with an even better search experience. This was achieved using FAST, an intelligent search engine that is part of Microsoft’s product range.

The existing search functionality was out-dated and limited to full-text search with a limited amount of filters, but lacking advanced search features like advanced language support, facetted navigation, entity detection, relevancy computation, ….

Visitors searching the site also missed an overview of the very diverse types of information available on the site. Other search applications worked fine for very specific queries (shares, bonds), but was too specialised for many visitors.

With the recent change to a pay-to-view business model, it was important to keep visitors interested by showing (teasers of) relevant information.
Because of the diversity in content types (recent and archived articles, shares, blogs, etc) it was also hard to make new content types available for search.

A localized (dutch and French), consolidated search application based on Fast ESP which allows visitors to search all content from a single web application. Visitors searching a one type of content, for example articles, simultaneously get other types of relevant information like video’s, blogs and shares/bonds. Visitors are guided in their search to by standard Fast functionality: faceted navigation, relevancy computations and sorting. The most popular queries are shown in a tag cloud.

This solution provides many benefits:

• Facets and relevancy provide relevant search results to visitors
• Consolidated search over many types of content, the most relevant results are shown in a single page
• Administrators are able to administer and tune search results using standard Fast functionality
• Reporting of search usage allows further tuning of search results
• New content types can be made searchable, using standard Fast connectors and a generic search application