Multiple Sites, One Search: How the City of Surrey Made Its Web Searches User-Friendly with OnPoint

Northern integrated a federated search across the City of Surrey’s many web properties, making it easier for residents to find essential information about city services.

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Paid Media (Search, Social, and Programmatic)

Need to Know

The City of Surrey has multiple web properties for its various services, putting the burden on citizens to understand where to find essential information.
Northern leveraged its cloud-based search solution, OnPoint Search, to crawl the city’s websites and create one centralized, unified search for the city’s numerous properties.
Surrey’s residents can now find information pulled from the city’s web properties, documents, and PDFs, and access it in seconds via search.

Client

The City of Surrey is not only one of Canada’s top ten cities, but also one of the fastest-growing and most diverse communities in the country.

Brief

Northern partnered with the City of Surrey to make information more widely available and findable for its residents across the city’s many web properties.

Right

Challenge

The City of Surrey uses contracted police services provided by the RCMP, has a city-funded but autonomous Libraries division, an arms-length economic development organization, and external organizations that run arts and cultural festivals. For these reasons, City information is spread across thousands of pages on multiple websites.

This created a complicated web architecture and put the burden on citizens to understand where to find essential information about city services.

OnPoint search results on the City of Surrey site

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Strategy

OnPoint Search is Northern’s cloud-based search solution. It automatically crawls and indexes content and metadata from across websites, intranets, documents, and even PDFs to return relevant search results in a single search index.

The Northern team leveraged OnPoint to index information from the city’s many web properties and make it easily searchable in one centralized location.

OnPoint Search provides many advantages to the City of Surrey, but the three most important are:

OnPoint Search is a federated search platform, meaning it can ingest content from multiple websites and sources and produce a single search index. Residents can visit any Surrey web platform and start a search. The results will include content from any Surrey web property and link the user to the content most relevant to their search, even if it’s from a separate website.
OnPoint Search is crawler-driven, processing all content published to Surrey websites, regardless of whether that content is published on Drupal or another platform. Surrey can create content through any tool and be confident that residents will find that information in their search results.
OnPoint Search puts configuration power in non-technical users’ hands. With an easy-to-use web console for configuration and search tuning, OnPoint allows site administrators and subject matter experts to refine search performance without developer support. Configuration controls are straightforward to learn and the results of changes can be previewed right in the Search interface for quick iteration.

Results

Within the first week of launching the new Surrey web platform powered by OnPoint Search, Surrey City Hall received a flood of calls from citizens thanking them for all the new services that had recently been launched.

The clerks at City Hall had to inform citizens that those services had always been provided — OnPoint just made the relevant information findable across the city’s websites.

Since then, Surrey has rolled OnPoint Search out across all their digital platforms and apps.

Their web team can now quickly make improvements based on feedback, user testing, and web analytics, and they can provide federated results from all properties, or lock results down to just a single site — all without assistance from IT.

Surrey continues to use OnPoint Search to power its citizens’ searches. Residents can easily find the information they need, no matter where it was originally published.

Power better user experiences with OnPoint Search.

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