March 2010 - The UK Electoral Commission Select Funnelback Website Search to Enable Fast, Accurate Searching and Contextual Navigation

Funnelback and Squiz UK today announced the successful delivery of website search powered by Funnelback for the UK Electoral Commission, providing fast and relevant search results with contextual navigation for improved usability. The project delivers a significant service improvement for the Electoral Commission as it has dramatically reduced the time it takes for users to find content.

To help users, from journalists and politicians to the general public and those working in elections, the Electoral Commission required a robust, fast, search solution for its website, and the thousands of documents contained within it. They required specific search functionality to meet their objectives, including automatic clustering of results, relevancy tuning, results filtering, real-time indexing and a simple administration interface for maintenance.

Funnelback Search, and Squiz UK, were selected by the Electoral Commission following a tender process. Having built the Electoral Commission’s website on its Open Source CMS, MySource Matrix, Squiz were uniquely familiar with their system and, along with the Funnelback technical experts, were able to implement the new solution fast. Usability of the site has been greatly improved through Funnelback’s superior search ranking functionality and features. ‘Contextual Navigation’ displays topics related to the user’s search query, providing suggestions for search refinements. Users can also refine their searches with filtering, categorised results and advanced search.

Funnelback further improves the user experience by highlighting search terms in results, displaying related items and automatically tuning its ranking algorithm, to improve relevancy, based on the popularity of search results and user ratings. Funnelback provides global and sub section searching and also enables indexing and searching of the Welsh language sections of the website.

“We are delighted with Funnelback,” said Clinton Proud, Head of Campaigns and Public Info, the Electoral Commission, “It has delivered what we set out in our requirements and has greatly improved the usability of the site. We are very impressed with how fast it is.”

Stephen Morgan, Managing Director, Squiz UK, said, “Since our acquisition of Funnelback in July 2009, our clients have been able to take advantage of its superior functionality and have benefited from the synergy we can offer between Funnelback and MySource Matrix installations. The speed and accuracy it delivers never fails to impress. Our working relationship with the Electoral Commission is going from strength to strength and we hope to add further enhancements to their web presence as it continues.”