New super search on ekonomifakta.se’s website

Monday, November 23, 2009

The website www.ekonomifakta.se is one of the most important sources of facts and statistics about Sweden’s economy. The website aims to assist visitors to quickly find what they are looking for. Hallvarsson & Halvarsson was entrusted with the task of creating a new internal search engine.

Relevant and pedagogical

The extensive content of financial facts and statistics on Ekonomifakta’s website was to be presented in an easily accessible way and be as foreseeable as possible. Hallvarsson & Halvarsson was assigned to product a suitable search engine as well as a search result page. The search engine must present results that are highly relevant to that is sought after. Ekonomifakta wanted to create a result page that actually was able to answer the visitor’s question without having to click further. At the same time the visitor should have the option to search further and dig deeper in the search result.

User behaviour the starting point

The basis of the assignment consisted of statistical information about visitor’s behaviour and what they searched for externally (i.e. www.google.se) as well as internally (on www.ekonomifakta.se). In order to obtain relevance in individual searches Google’s search engine for companies, Search Appliance (GSA), was used to index the content. With this data the search result page was created. 

The new search result page, available only in Swedish, presents the result in pedagogical listings in different categories, for example the statistical section and the article archive, on the website. Hence a pallet of categories was created that addresses the given search word. Images, if available, were also shown.

Fills many functions

The navigation on Ekonomifakta’s website has radically changed since the new search engine was implemented. The search result is used for navigation, for example ‘Most popular search’ or ‘Latest search’. This type of development is not very common today but is expected to appear on many websites in a near future. Companies know their own websites the best and can therefore through a search engine assignment such as this one adjust the search behaviour and assist the visitor to navigate through the large about of information on the website.

Read more:

Case: Successful search engine implementation on Ekonomifakta.se