It don't come easy

Installing an enterprise search tool takes hard work, but the results speak for themselves.

By Michele Hope, Network World
March 07, 2005 12:07 AM ET

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Monica Lavin is executive director of Web initiatives at Thomas Industrial Network, a 100-year-old company in New York known for its Thomas Register "green books" that catalog information on U.S. industrial manufacturers and suppliers.

Thomas Industrial was ready to show an integrated, online face to the world, in the form of its Web site, ThomasNet.com. The mission was to bring together industrial buyers and suppliers on a national, regional and local level.

After carefully defining her requirements, Lavin knew support for customization was going to be one of the most important features she would need in an enterprise search tool. The company spent several months exploring the search functionality of the Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) AdVisor, before Thomas made the decision to purchase the product.

One thing that tipped the scales in FAST's favor was the ability to modify some of its algorithms. "We wanted to be able to weight different types of documents," Lavin says.

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Lavin and her team learned early on in the process that users coming to the ThomasNet site wanted product information first, followed by information about companies that made the product. If an engineer came to the site looking for information on five-way ball valves, for instance, Lavin wanted the search engine to return results that offered whatever detailed product information on five-way ball valves existed in Thomas Industrial's databases. To help them accomplish this task, Lavin wanted the enterprise search product to let Thomas give a higher weighting to this type of structured data, stored in various database tables.

ThomasNet is fueled by many of the company's own databases that store content about industrial suppliers and products, and is frequently updated by Thomas Industrial's team of editors. This equates to millions of records in legacy databases, with each of ThomasNet's 625,000 companies listed in multiple categories.

ThomasNet is also required to index the public Web sites of about half its suppliers, which often include a variety of PDF files containing detailed engineering specifications or CAD drawings related to the products they manufacture.

After buying the product, it took Thomas another year of testing and prototyping before the company felt confident the system was ready for prime time. "It was a very painful process," Lavin says, referring to this early phase. "We had a committed team of about six people who spent a good nine months in a conference room without windows."

Much of the work involved developing user scenarios, performing needs analysis and testing current sites to determine what users found most useful. The final phase of this process was the actual Web site design, which Lavin says was the easiest part, after completing all the steps that had gone before it.

All the upfront work appears to have paid off. ThomasNet.com now routinely records between 2 million to 3 million searches per month, with 50% of current users representing repeat traffic. Users often comment on how easy the system is to use, says Lavin, who notes that ThomasNet has also received its share of recent recognition in industry journals for its design requiring the fewest number of clicks to the most relevant information. According to Lavin, the company also received a recent nod in January from Forrester Research, which cited ThomasNet.com as the gold standard for industrial search in North America.