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Case Study Danish Genealogy
Just Got a Search Bar

16,000

unique documents

175 MB PDFs

of up to 3,000 pages each

2.5 million

individual pages

library shelves

Overview

We've all been there - rifting through our "important papers" folder trying to find that one bit of information that we need. You know how much of a headache that was. Now scale that up. Then scale that up by another factor of ten. In fact, make that folder an entire library. Imagine what it would be like looking for that one bit of information by hand.

This was what Site Search 360 tackled into our collaboration with The Danish Genealogy Society Library. The library was looking for a solution that would make it easy to quickly navigate their vast collection of digital documents, and Site Search 360 provided the flexibility and precision that enabled visitors to their site to find what they were looking for simply and intuitively.

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[Site Search 360] replaces a widely used search engine, and our users are excited about the improvement of results — the most common comment is "now, I find a magnitude more books and documents when I do a search of for instance a family name."

5-star-rating

Per Hundevad Andersen
Manager, Genealogy Library of Denmark

The challenge

One word: Google. In more detail, before switching to us, the library was looking for a replacement for Google custom search. The search they had implemented was not pulling up all the relevant documents, it was cumbersome, and was not easy to adjust to their specific needs.
And their needs were not small - it was essential that their users be able to quickly search through 16,000 unique documents, some of which were 175 MB behemoth PDFs of up to 3,000 pages that needed to be searchable in the blink of an eye. Not a trivial task by any measure.

    16,000
    unique documents
    175 MB PDFs
    of up to 3,000 pages each
    2.5 million
    individual pages

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    The solution

    The built-in flexibility of Site Search 360 and its unique underlying logical architecture allowed us to index the full suite of documents from the library and break down the data provided into more granular nuclei of meaning, giving our search solution the power to find the needles in haystacks that users were coming to the library's site to uncover.
    Not only could site visitors look for the things expected - family names and the names of specific localities - but they could also search in sync with the principles of the past: they could search for farm names, too.

    Thanks to this, our search solution is one of the very things you see on this site, and we are now helping people discover their roots even to the specifics of the farms where their ancestors put down literal roots.

    "I love [that] it is a standard but highly configurable solution that is easy to adjust without programming."

    photo manager genealogy library of denmark

    Per Hundevad Andersen
    Manager, Genealogy Library of Denmark