Custom Search Solutions

Standard search tools have often been found inappropriate for projects that we have undertaken or advised upon. Typically this is where the information to be searched is rather specific to the application and where plain word searches produce too many spurious results or fail to find closely-related information.

We've therefore built specialised tools for client profiling, product knowledge and also for the property market. These can be adapted for other applications as appropriate.

We have used the following approaches but are open to expanding this list. We are also open to perform evaluations of any proprietary tools that clients would like to consider, especially those that are open sourced.

• Reverse indexes where the content is periodically scanned and a search index built.
• Tagging systems that use a relational database to find matches on multiple tags
• Extended tagging using ordered tag sets and proximity assessment to find nearest matches.
• Blended system that use indices and tagging to search bodies of structured data linked to unstructured text.

Up to now these approaches have been built around web interfaces which can either be explicit query-by-example or embedded more deeply within applications.