Business Impact Article - Posted 5/28/2009
Views: 170
Rate This Evidence:
Leading aggregator of the day’s most important industry news scales business on the FAST enterprise search platform
Through its e-mail newsletters and its Web site, SmartBrief delivers “must-read” news to over 1.5 million thought leaders and high-potential professionals. SmartBrief covers 20 keys industries through over 75 publications and 45,000 company news pages. Each day its readers receive the best and most important news stories so they can stay informed and save time. Since it launched in 1999, SmartBrief has been on a growth trajectory. Its publication topics have expanded from about 30 newsletters in 2006 to over 75 newsletters today. While it has built circulation on top core publications, like the National Restaurant Association SmartBrief, it also has introduced many new publications and has branched into new industries. And the growth continues. SmartBrief expects to introduce another 30 publications this year.
Search is critical to SmartBrief’s value proposition to both its editors and its readers. Editors must be able to quickly identify the most important stories and turn them around for distribution. A quick turnaround ensures a concise, relevant and timely experience that keeps the SmartBrief reader base loyal. When a reader visits or is redirected to SmartBrief.com, the goal is to encourage easy navigation to and discovery of topics, related stories, and company information.
Challenge
As SmartBrief grew, the limitations of its original search solution were exposed. These limitations were first uncovered in the editorial process. New publications and coverage of new industries required SmartBrief editors to examine a wider base of original content to select the right news stories. Without an effective search tool, editors reached data overload in their discovery process. This overload hindered the speed at which SmartBrief could scale.
 |
SmartBrief was looking for a scalable and fl exible search platform for its growing B2B business and we found it in FAST. We’ve been able to extend and enhance both our proprietary, internally-focused Web applications, and our customer-facing Web site with FAST and continue to come up with new uses all the time. |
 |
|
Chris McNeilly Vice President, Technology, SmartBrief, Inc. |
|
|
SmartBrief also understood the need to expand its connection points with customers beyond newsletters to include a Web site through which customers could see related articles and the most up-to-date information on a SmartBrief industry. This new channel needed a search solution that could package content flexibly, such as by industry, topic, or company, and would encourage browsing on the SmartBrief.com Web site.
Solution
For its editors, SmartBrief embedded the FAST ESP experience into its own application making search a part of the editorial workflow. The workflow process begins with Web crawling to undercover stories. Over 20,000 stories are crawled each day. The editors do not have to get involved in the process until the stories have been gathered. Search intelligence in the crawling process ensures only relevant stories are collected.
A complete and relevant set of stories is critical starting point for SmartBrief briefs. Editors review stories to determine topics to cover in their briefs. Through search, editors get the full breadth of content related to a topic including stories from multiple sources and historical stories. Drag and drop capabilities allow editors to easily incorporate content and links into their briefs.
SmartBrief also utilizes the FAST ESP engine to power search on its customer facing Web site. Visitors are provided several different lenses into a SmartBrief industry, including ‘Latest News’, ‘Press Releases’, ‘Most Clicked Stories’, ‘Topics’, and ‘Job Listings’—each driven by search. The experience delivered under each lens is tailored to context. For example, ‘Topics’ results are segmented into four categories—‘All Sources’, ‘News’, ‘Press Releases’, and ‘Editors Pick’—in a tab format. Job listings show company, job location, and date posted along with a description snippet.
In addition to industry briefs, over 45,000 company profiles are available on SmartBrief.com. These pages include news about a company as well as company overviews and are driven by search. As part of the indexing process, company names are identified and “extracted.” On any SmartBrief industry page, users may navigate to company profiles through a list of companies that appear in articles under that topic.
SmartBrief also has decided to upgrade its homegrown search solution for its job listings pages to FAST ESP. Because the majority of SmartBrief’s 1.5 million subscribers are senior business decision makers (VP-level or above), SmartBrief is a powerful outlet for job postings and recruiters looking to target passive job seekers. The FAST solution will allow SmartBrief to capitalize on this revenue stream as it grows.
Benefits and Results
- Faster Editor Turnaround – With the FAST solution, SmartBrief editors are able to find and make use of relevant stories approximately six times faster.
- Growth in Online Traffic – SmartBrief’s online channel grew from having little Web site traffic to over 2.5 million pages views per month over a 16-month period.
- Search Foundation for Growth – The FAST ESP search platform has scaled with SmartBrief’s growth and will continue to scale as SmartBrief expands into new publications, industries, and revenue models.
Why FAST?
In examining search vendors, SmartBrief had two main goals. First, it wanted a solution that could grow with the company. Secondly, it wanted to seamlessly embed the solution into SmartBrief processes and products.
FAST provides SmartBrief the option to scale easily. As it grows and launches new products, SmartBrief does not have worry about hardware because it’s able to modularly add commodity hardware to support its growth. Additionally, as its sources expand, SmartBrief can easily reindex content in FAST.
FAST also gives SmartBrief a level of control over its experience. Many other solutions SmartBrief examined tended to be more of a “black box.” FAST gives the SmartBrief team control over relevancy and UI implementation. While having control over both of these is important to the Web site experience, having control over the UI implementation is particularly critical to embedding the FAST solution into the editor’s workflow.
SmartBrief selected FAST with the future in mind. The FAST solution has supported SmartBrief through growth in volume, changes in industries covered, and launches of new products.
For more information about FAST please visit:
www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch.
