Continuing our series of interviews with the team at Perficient, today I invite George Chang, Solutions Architect, to explain the critical role site search plays in his projects and why he recommends Coveo for Sitecore.
George recently reviewed the new Coveo for Sitecore Pro Cloud Edition which brings self-learning intelligent search to Sitecore customers for the first time.
Marie-Michele: George, what role does intelligent site search play in the projects you work on?
George: Site search has become an integral part of every project we do. Regardless if it’s an intranet, an extranet, or a public site, every solution is inherently a collection of content that is published to consumers and search is the best way to locate that content. The search discussion is a larger discussion at its core – by using search as the catalyst, we can create an entryway for discussions about content structure, information architecture, and metadata. This results in a more educated content author that can create more relevant and more contextual content that can then be easily returned by search to the target audience.
Marie-Michele: How does Perficient take advantage of Coveo?
George: We have taken advantage of the Coveo for Sitecore Free Edition quite a bit since its release to provide enterprise-grade search for Sitecore to our customers without extra costs. Additionally, customers are excited to have this foundational building block to expand their intelligent search capabilities in the future, by purchasing an enterprise license and seamlessly index the rest of their content into the same index.
As I mentioned, in my recent post, we’ve been very impressed with the Coveo product as it brings enterprise-grade search capabilities to Sitecore as well as provide a bevy of connectors to other platforms. With Coveo Machine-Learning, the new Pro Cloud edition opens up even more possibilities for customers and developers alike. Due to the advantages of Coveo and the availability of the Free and Pro Cloud Editions, we strive to lead with Coveo as our preferred search platform for our customers.
Marie-Michele: Why would you recommend Coveo over Solr to your customers?
George: While Solr has had a stronghold over Sitecore search for many years, Coveo has brought feature and price parity to Solr, with the advantages of an established intelligent search platform. The availability of pre-built Sitecore components powered by the Coveo JavaScript UI framework significantly cuts down on development time and effort for common user interfaces. Also, the number of connectors Coveo has available for various platforms in its enterprise edition makes indexing line-of-business content easy and code-free. We have had customers that previously used Solr as their search platform due to cost. However, once Coveo released the free edition of Coveo for Sitecore, they were eager to migrate over due to the difficulties they had encountered with Solr and the support that Coveo was able to provide if necessary.
Marie-Michele: Would you highlight any specific customer examples?
George: At a leading automotive distributor, we used the Sitecore and Coveo platforms to provide a portal for the corporate office to broadcast content to the thousands of dealer users across south-central United States. A large amount of content consists of documents which we have been able to surface with Coveo search. Coveo’s ability to parse the content of PDFs and Office documents to return relevant results to users has provided a huge boost in the way that content is located and the compounded efficiencies that result from that. Additionally, by using the Coveo JavaScript Framework components for Sitecore, we were able to significantly cut down on development time in order to launch within the expected timeframe. By using Coveo for their search needs, the automotive distributor has the foundation for a full-blown intelligent search platform that can span across all of their line of business applications and portals.
Thanks to George for sharing his experiences. For more insights from the Perficient team, read our prior interviews about using site search to drive contextual experiences and implementation best practices.
Coveo for Sitecore is the first and only cloud-based, self-learning site search app for Sitecore that automatically learns from visitor behavior, tunes relevance and recommends relevant content. Learn more about the available editions and try Coveo for free at www.coveo.com/sitecore.
