Product Launch: Nielsen Enterprise Search

As Project Lead on the Nielsen Enterprise Search rebuild, I was tasked with finding the right technology to drive Nielsen's next generation search tools for all Nielsen Business Media websites.  This entailed reviewing vendors for industry leaders in Search Technology including: Google, FAST, and Endeca.

We chose Endeca to power our next generation search functionality.  We are slated to launch Endeca on all Nielsen websites by 2010.  The following details Endeca's roll out on Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Kitchen & Bath:

By integrating Endeca into Billboard.com, we linked all of the data elements related to a single article (ie. Charts, Artists, Videos, Articles and Tours ) into one search result using 'Guided Navigation'.  This feature gave Billboard.com users the ability to drill further into results to access other related articles.

Billboard had a tremendous amount of data elements and it was challenging to highlight them all within one result page. We opted for spotlights to highlight specific elements above the actual search results.  We also did Usability Testing with user groups to gather feedback on the UI and will be implementing these changes in the next version.

In The HollywoodReporter integration, we 

opted for a more subtle approach since THR did not have as wide a breadth of data elements as Billboard. The result was a more streamlined and less cluttered interface.

Similar to Billboard, we implemented spotlights to highlight data elements as part of the search on the right sidebar.

We took a different approach with Kitchen & Bath since we did not have data elements other than articles and the publisher wanted the search to encompass a large dataset including industry websites and press releases. We implemented Endeca's web crawling engine to crawl over 1500+ websites in the kitchen and bath industry and returned their results alongside with KBB's own articles.

Technology: Endeca, J2EE, XML, Prototype