IFACnet - Enterprise Search Engine > Case Study

Case Study - IFACnet - Enterprise Search Engine

The International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) is the global organization for the accountancy profession and is to accounting what the Olympic committee is to sport. IFAC has 163 member organizations in 120 countries representing 2.5 million accountants employed in public practice, industry and commerce, government, and academia worldwide.

When IFAC first came to INDEZ they were looking to develop a global web-based resource intended for use by their their members organizations and the accountants they represent. This resource would provide a one-stop access to the thousands of articles, management tools and good practice guidance documents developed by IFAC and their member organizations.

INDEZ was chosen over the other numerous competitors due to the superior technical performance of the INDEZ Enterprise Search platform. This included beating off competition against solutions which used technology developed by some of the heavyweight players within the search industry.

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In order to display the most relevant documents possible to users, INDEZ has worked closely with IFAC to develop a custom ranking algorithm for the sorting of documents within the IFACnet search engine. This customisation of the ranking algorithm was due to the majority of important document being in PDF/MSWord format and containing many pay per view and password protected documents.

Another reason this customisation was neccessary was that the ranking of search results be unbiased towards any participant organisations and documents published by multiple organisations be automatically accredited. Additionally the number of results displayed for each organisation be needed to be ‘unlimited’ unlike conventional search engines that show only a few results per website.

IFACnet provides advanced search which allow users to quickly and intuitively refine their searches. Advanced search options include being able to search by individual participant organizstion, document format, language, and date range. These features are also available directly from the results page by click on the date, language, document format or organisational logo. This later method is something that is unique to INDEZ Enterprise Search.

Another innovation is the ability of the system to provide real time search suggestions on what the user is typing as they type it into the search box. These suggestions are based on a combination of live and historical data that users type into the search engine.