The core of the Funnelback search tool is its ranking function. Our ranking function combines many sources of evidence, such as the content and structure of the document, internal and external metadata, website structure, link structure, user interaction data, publication dates, and external textual annotations such as anchortext and tags.

In order to achieve accurate and reliable rankings, we extract as much useful evidence as possible and weight it according to its value and reliability. All of the components of the system are well engineered and standards compliant while tolerant of prevalent violations of standards found in most applications. Data gathering components are able to recognise duplicate and near-duplicate content/sites. Our text filters reliably extract text content and metadata for indexing. Our link analysis tools recognise subtle affiliations as well as obvious ones. The indexer must know what to index and what not to index.

We also provide a kit of tools to help people refine and improve their queries, or to find good results despite query deficiencies: presentation of partially matching results, spelling correction, thesaurus expansion, annotation matching, two different levels of stemming, dynamic faceting of search results, and search result mining (Contextual Navigation).

1. Poor searchability on intranets and websites costs money and impedes achievement of business objectives.
2. Good searchability is needed at all levels.
3. Understand how modern search engines actually work - or your optimisation efforts will be misdirected.
4. Don’t engage in unethical optimisation or you may annoy people and be blacklisted by search engines.
5. Don’t rely on subject and description metadata.
6. Optimise your site to help searchers — good content, simple URLs, incoming links, useful anchortext.

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Funnelback specialises in managed search solutions. We design, implement and deliver a first class managed search service to many leading corporate and Government clients.

Funnelback has a strong presence in the Federal Government market. We provide search for the Government’s online entry point www.australia.gov.au as well as many other Government agencies, such as the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Department of Health and Ageing, the Treasury, the Department of Finance and Deregulation, the Bureau of Metrology, the AFP, Medicare Australia, the Department of Human Services and Geoscience Australia.

We also provide search for many Australian State and Local Government websites, including a whole of Queensland Government search solution where we power search for www.qld.gov.au as well as over 90 Queensland Government websites.

Some of Funnelback’s corporate clients include the Westpac Banking Corporation, Telstra, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), BT Financial and NPS.

Funnelback manages all aspects of the hosted service including the hardware, installation of the software (and subsequent upgrades), network traffic / bandwith, crawling, indexing and query processing. We also offer tailored support packages, including SLAs and access to your own dedicated admin UI that enables a number of functions such as editing search form files (look and feel), setting up featured pages (best bets) and viewing your search analytics logs.