Elaph.com, one of the first Arabic-language electronic newspapers launched in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in 2001 by Elaph Publishing, has installed Google Search Appliance to improve search relevance and provide unified search results for the website’s visitors. Elaph.com is managed by Integrated Intelligent Solutions (IN2SOL), one of Middle East’s leading providers of diverse range of end-to-end IT services and solutions with established presence in the region.
As one of the region’s largest news site, Elaph.com produces trusted text, graphics, video, and pictures for its regional audiences. It relies on a variety of media sources and formats including video, images, and graphics. The site reaches its users worldwide in offices, homes, and mobile phones, giving them quick access to the news and data they require, anytime, anywhere. Elaph.com required a robust search solution with the ability to search multiple sources of content and to query constantly-updated news databases in real-time.
“We needed a way to provide quick and accurate search results to the visitors on our site,” explains Abdullah Al Masoud, the General Manager at IN2SOL. “Our previous search solution was difficult for the Elaph web team to maintain because it required extensive resources in order to update relevant algorithms when new content was added to the network.”
The web team at IN2SOL set out to rebuild the underlying search platform for Elaph.com with Google Search Appliance, a part of the Google Enterprise suite, because of the faith they had in the Google brand name. Google Search Appliance provided them with fast, relevant search for intranets and websites. An on-premise, easy-to-deploy solution, the Google Search Appliance was easier to set up and provided high relevancy right out of the box. It was customised to meet the specific needs of Elaph.com and can be scaled easily as the content grows.
“Google Search Appliance provides the same search experience of its well know online search facilities,” pointed out Saleh Al Mutairi, GM for FVC’s operations in KSA, Google Enterprise’s VAD for Middle East and North Africa. “We worked closely with our partner and the team at IN2SOL to ensure that they were able to optimise the use of the appliance within their system.”
According to Al Masoud, once the Google search solution was launched, the number of search queries immediately soared and continues to grow. “Search results are accurate and fast. The search solution not only searches the headers of the news articles, but also searches within the body text of the news articles. Users are definitely pleased to have the capability to search breaking news easily, quickly and accurately. Since implementing the Google Search Appliance, both our search queries and our page views have grown tremendously – and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” concludes Al Masoud.
