Affino's Next Level Search Engine

There has been no single event which re-defined the Affino Site Search engine over the past year, but taken together all the updates have transformed your ability to get the best content in front of your audience.

Moving to Amazons AWS Search

The most significant move forward this past year was to embrace Amazon’s AWS Search service. This has significantly improved the speed and overall performance of the search. We can feed the search service with far more data than before, along with a host of meta data, e.g. topics, navigation, dates, sections and much more on each content item we send through.

This not only means better quality search results, but as you can see on the visual below, you can now set up multiple drill-down menu options on the site search so users can fully explore your content, and filter by just what they need.

Content, Contacts and Companies

For the first time we not only support the searching of your site content, which includes everything from articles, to products, to events, forums, media and more; we now also make it possible for you to include companies and contacts from your CRM in the site search.

These are tightly controlled based on their privacy settings, and your own security levels and public content preferences for companies and contacts.

You can specify how many of each to list out in the intial search results, and designate different meta data to present alongside each type. Affino also has unique search result layouts for each so that it’s easy to differentiate between them.

Scoped (aka Section Searches) now also use the new AWS search engine, and benefit from the same improved performance and search capabilities.

This means that all the focused directory, event, and insight searches you have are all eqully fast and effective.

What’s Next for Affino Search

The upcoming releases see further formatting and styling enhancements, especially on mobile and small tablet devices where the search will just look and feel that much better.

We are also rolling out a new generation predictive search on the Search DE so that you can have the same instant search results across contacts, companies and content when typing your search term on any page where the element is used.

How to make the most of Affino’s New Search Engine

Top Tips for making the most of your new Affino Search:

• Explore the Search Profile and try out as many options as make sense for you.
• You should run any number of site searches to see what results come up, and where you’re not seeing the results you want add in fresh content, update the Topics, and improve the media on the Channels, Sections, Articles, Event, Media et al. to make sure your content is optimised for your audience
• Open up relevant parts of your CRM to promote the experts, authors, key contributors and industry figures on your sites.
• Update your Taxonomy to empower your audience to drill down into the contacts and content effectively
• Add Scoped Searches to your content listings where they most make sense, including events, directories, and features listings
• Don’t forget about the smart Product Search for showcasing large product catalogues

We have seen some great implementations of the new Search, and where clients have focused their efforts they are delighted with the new improved accuracy of the search engine and it’s ability to surface the best content.

If you want a quick walkthrough of what the Affino search delivers then contact us through the Support Forums, or your account manager directly for a quick demo.