Search, APIs, Capability Management and the Sensis Journey

Craig Rees

Project background Platform selection Search capability Relevance Architecture Quality management Hurdles Whats next

Todays menu

 Sensis helps Australians find, buy and sell From print directories to a cross-platform lead generator Sensis publishes over 1.8 Million business listings Two of the top 10 visited online sites in Australia (WhitePages.com.au and YellowPages.com.au)

Sensis

Business objectives

Drive presence in the local search market place Open up the largest database of business listings in Australia Reduce the effort required from local search developers Free to use, we are after the reporting Technology objectives

Develop a total search platform Relevancy testing as part of the development lifecycle A framework to identify problem spaces Manageable platform Continuous deployments

Project background

Developer portal

Support for the search capability team Structured vs non structured data Deterministic vs black box Non propriety code base Community backing

Platform selection

Optimized Managed Monitored Adhoc Unmanaged

Lvl 5

A/B testing Machine learning External collaboration Multiple contexts Online dashboards Test environments Dynamic search refinements Targets and metrics Defined team Regular monitoring Static autosuggest Basic linguistics Adhoc processes Part time team Static dictionaries Individual led innovation No resources No reporting Out of the box features

Lvl 4

Lvl 3

Lvl 2

Lvl 1

The Sensis Search capability maturity model

*Courtesy of Pete Crawford & Craig Lonsdale

Location

Intent Name Type Product Spatial

Chronology

Social Graph

Device

Individual

Context is key

Business Data

Geo Service

Solr
Business Data MongoDB Index Type Query Handler Historical search Data Reporting Events Ontologies Name Query Handler API

Mashery
Search Service Publisher Reporting Service

Our architecture

Business Data

Geo Service

Solr
Business Data MongoDB Index Type Query Handler Historical search Data Reporting Events Ontologies Name Query Handler API

Mashery
Search Service Publisher Reporting Service

Data staging

Business Data

Geo Service

Solr
Business Data MongoDB Index Type Query Handler Historical search Data Reporting Events Ontologies Name Query Handler API

Mashery
Search Service Publisher Reporting Service

Search

Business Data

Geo Service

Solr
Business Data MongoDB Index Type Query Handler Historical search Data Reporting Events Ontologies Name Query Handler API

Mashery
Search Service Publisher Reporting Service

API

Business Data

Geo Service

Solr
Business Data MongoDB Index Type Query Handler Historical search Data Reporting Events Ontologies Name Query Handler API

Mashery
Search Service Publisher Reporting Service

API proxy

 Moved from a black box solution to a manageable platform Deliver search improvements without major code changes Understand how results were calculated Identity problems scientifically Continuously tune and test relevance

Yesterday

Today

Tomorrow

Evolution of search management

Path Analysis used to identify problems spaces

Specific gold sets for each problem space:

Intent Spelling & stemming Location Phrase parsing

Gold Sets used to define overall quality score (TREC)

Features signed off only when they make a positive impact to quality score

Problem spaces, quality management & tuning

Search quality analysis and testing

Results examiner

Score analysis

Tuning

Lather, rinse, repeat

Data redundancy and homogeneity Solr ranking of rare terms Intent differentiation Contextual synonyms

Hurdles along the way

Query engine Facets / autosuggest Real time tuning Machine learning Multi term queries Scoring thresholds Content Value

Where next?

Email: craig.rees@sensis.com.au www: developers.sensis.com.au Twitter: @SensisAPI @ablebagel

Questions?