Rogers

Several of Rogers websites – macleans.ca, chatelaine.com, advisor.ca and canadianbusinesss.com – had suffered due to poor search functionality. Rogers had selected Endeca’s search and information access software to resolve the issue and needed a firm that could implement Endeca effectively.  RealDecoy was recommended by Endeca and selected to implement the new search solution across the four sites. 

THE CHALLENGE

Poor search results

The percentage of visitors who were leveraging the search functionality on the four web properties was low. Search results weren’t proving particularly relevant. Articles returned were often out of date or were not relevant to the search term.

Inability to access metadata

On the technical side, Rogers was having difficulty indexing the data on its site for the purpose of yielding worthwhile search results. Because its system simply used a Web crawler to search for data, there was no way for the crawler to access the metadata associated with a particular article and it was impossible for the search engine to rate the relevance of certain keywords.

If a visitor was searching a site for an author of a particular article, the site’s search engine had no way of knowing the difference between the author, say Marc Chrétien, and an article’s subject, for instance, the former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. This contributed to the poor search results which were frustrating site visitors.

OUR SOLUTION

Filtering results through a content management system

RealDecoy was able to solve the poor search results problem by switching the search engine’s data acquisition from a Web crawler approach to a direct integration between Endeca and Rogers’ content management system (CMS).

Once we had access to raw unstructured data and elements such as taglines, keywords, authors and publication dates, we added a custom template to the CMS. This template allowed web editors to update the site simply by clicking the ‘publish’ button and also generated an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that would be used by the search engine. This allowed the search engine to filter information based on metadata in the XML file.

A scalable template

RealDecoy developed a scalable template so that when Rogers is ready to convert other properties to Endeca as a search engine, it can use the base infrastructure now in place. This gives Rogers the flexibility to build out further tools related to Endeca in the future.

Our work on Rogers’ media properties left the client so pleased that we were brought in to implement the Content Acquisition and Syndication Hub (CASH).

Rogers engaged Endeca and RealDecoy to design and implement a Content Acquisition and Syndication Hub (CASH) application using the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP).

THE CHALLENGE

Making articles available to clients

Rogers wanted to make all online articles from all of its media properties available to web content providers such as Yahoo!, MSN and Canoe so that these clients could, in turn, buy articles from Rogers and republish them on their own websites. Rogers needed to capture all of its articles and aggregate them into a specific tool, run on the Endeca Information Access Platform (IAP). The articles were published on the Interwoven information platform.

OUR SOLUTION

A content aggregation system

RealDecoy created an application that allows Rogers to easily create news feeds for its customers. The application allows content subscribers to download feeds to a custom XML format on an ongoing basis. It fully automates the collection and aggregation of content through the Endeca information transformation layer, and is deployed in an extranet environment for syndicated content purchasers.

This project has generated a new net revenue stream for Rogers and the application can create any type of direct feed from all of Rogers’ media properties archives.

The client was, once again, extremely happy with our work, and several new phases to the project are in the planning stages.