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Improving Search |
With the dominance of search engines like Google and Yahoo -- which together are the entry point for roughly 70% of all searches conducted on the Web -- media organizations have enlisted various strategies to increase exposure to their content. As some companies tinker with search optimization techniques or buy keywords to improve content visibility, others are going straight to the source.
Since March 2006, Reed Business a global business-to-business publisher with $2.3 billion in revenue, has been developing a search project to rival Google. With more than 80% of Reed Business' traffic coming from search engines, says Graeme McCracken, COO of Reed Business Search, the Zibb project grew out of the concern "that Google and Yahoo could search our sites better than we could."
So Reed Business enlisted categorization software from Teragram Corp. and FAST Search and Transfer's enterprise search technology to create a vertical search engine. It has deployed Zibb search on 22 Reed Business sites and at Zibb.com and will go live on an additional 170 by mid-2007.
Zibb uses a semantic understanding of the pages it searches (where the search understands the context of a Web page and its relationship to other pages rather than simply looking for instances of a given term). McCracken says the search tool returns more targeted results -- with, say, true research-oriented results separated from vendor results.
Search traffic on Reed Business sites like Variety magazine has increased tenfold. And following Google's model, Zibb aggregates the most relevant information from around the Web, not just from Reed Business sites. "We want to provide the user with the best answer without bias toward our content," he says. "At the end of the day, search has to be about the user."
--L.H.
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Incremental but Inevitable Change
As the content channels multiply, publishers are adding applications and data to an increasingly complex architecture. To enable change without inviting integration headaches, many publishers are employing service-oriented architecture (SOA).
HBSP and Rodale, for example, loosely couple applications so they can introduce apps and processes without jettisoning what they already have or integrating systems. Instead, applications call on data as services and coordinate activity without tying data together.
Rodale's Citron uses various apps, from a Vignette content management system to Brightcove for video streaming. "Having a loosely coupled, data-driven architecture really lets us plug and play," he says. "We wouldn't have the flexibility to publish daily without it."
HBSP's architecture reflects a similar philosophy. MarkLogic Server is loosely coupled with Harvard Business Online and, down the road, will be tied with HBSP's Documentum content repository, allowing the company to publish case studies online in real time. "To the extent that we do things that are hard-wired, hard coded or point to point, it makes us less flexible -- and then we're in trouble," Lubeck says.
But no matter how flexible systems are, changing long-standing models requires companies to shed decades of entrenched culture and practice. "We have evolved because of a willingness to say 'We change or we die,'" Lubeck says. "It hasn't been easy, but we've all agreed from a strategic standpoint that it's important." And O'Reilly's Rayhill agrees. "If American Idol has taught us anything, it's that people want a total, immersive experience. The sooner we ... wake up to that reality, the better off we'll be."
Lauren Horwitz, former managing editor, production, for CIO Decisions, is now managing editor for TechTarget's Data Center Media Group. Write to her at lhorwitz@techtarget.com.
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