Quepid & Flax – if you’re not testing your search, you’re doing it wrong!

Earlier this year an e-commerce company asked us to look into how they should improve how they tested their website search queries. A relatively simple task you might think - but the company concerned has a turnover of over a billion pounds with at least half of this via digital channels, so measuring how well search works is essential to preserve revenue. Like (I suspect) many others, they were recording the results of thousands of test searches, carried out manually by their s...Continue reading

An open approach to tuning search for gov.uk

Roo Reynolds from the GDS team has written a great blog post about the ongoing process of tuning the search for gov.uk which I can highly recommend. We regularly see situations where a search project has been set up as 'fire and forget' - which is never a good idea: not only does content grow, but use...Continue reading

Tuning and improving elasticsearch for the Government Digital Service

The exciting GOV.UK project is getting close to its first release date of October 17th and we were asked by them to help with some search tuning as they migrate from Apache Solr to elasticsearch. Although elasticsearch has some great features there are still some areas where it lags Solr, such as the lack of spelling suggestion and proximity...Continue reading