Background

The London School of Economics and Political Science is a School of the University of London and is one of the foremost social science universities in the world. It is a specialist university with an international intake and a global reach. Its research and teaching spans the full breadth of the social sciences, from economics, politics and law to sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance.

Our brief

LSE (London School of Economics) approached BOCC to help them fine tune their existing Google Mini Search Appliance integrated with the current LSE websites. LSE required some help in improving the search results and updating the category filters for the appliance. This was in order to improve and return more relevant and targeted results for site users.

Our solution

One of our systems development consultants undertook the following as part of the review:

• An initial discussion with one of consultants to confirm the areas to investigate.
• Arranged remote access to the Google Mini Search to review the current configuration and filtering.
• BOCC made recommendations to improve the appliance performance and outline the changes needed to LSE.
• On agreement of the above, BOCC made the necessary changes directly to the appliance for LSE to review.

After gaining access to the Google Mini search configuration, BOCC were able to identify issues and make recommendations quickly, which significantly improved the performance of the system.  Further indepth recommendations were made and after these were implemented, searching and system performance was raised to a standard that users would find acceptable. 

LSE selected BOCC since we already had prior experience in implementing and integrating Google Search Appliances for medium-sized organisations.

BOCC had already worked with clients such as Trade Unions Congress (TUC) and the International Transport Workers' Federation in a similar way. Both of these clients required a cohesive and intuitive search mechanism to enable users to search across their family of sites using a familiar search interface.