In a recent Forrester Research survey, almost 50% of users surveyed said the first thing they did when navigating an unfamiliar web site was to use the site search function to find information. Yet, according to Forrester, more than half of the sites they recently reviewed failed to provide a comprehensive site search or search interface. Failures included: not retrieving appropriate information ordered by relevance, not providing clearly worded search results and not giving useful options to narrow down results.

It's not uncommon for companies to spend upwards of $1M on a web site redesign and then neglect or skimp on providing an enterprise-class search engine, forcing users to either try to guess where information might be, or turn to a public web search engine to find out the information they need on your products and services. Why risk losing sales or frustrating customers when you can provide them with a superior search experience with the Vivísimo Velocity Search Platform and keep them on your site? Here is just a sample of what Velocity can provide to your customers, prospects and partners:

Automatic categorization. The Velocity Clustering Engine organizes search results into topical categories that are intelligently selected from the words and phrases contained in the results or documents themselves. This allows users to click on the topic area they are interested in without having to wade through a long list of unrelated results and saves you the time and energy of tagging every document or page available.

PDF indexing. If you're like most enterprises, you put a lot of your content for public view in PDF format. Unfortunately, PDF's longer than a page or two don't get indexed well by most search engines, forcing users to download big files and hunt through them page by page in order to find their search terms, causing some users to skip these files altogether. The Velocity Search Engine allows you to index PDF files paragraph by paragraph, ensuring that users know exactly what they are getting before they download.

Key-matching. Corporate web sites using Velocity can perform key-matching on popular search terms and topics, and allow the administrator to place the most likely answers to queries at the top of the results list, making for happier customers.

Spotlight results. Velocity gives you the ability to highlight certain search results that you want to make sure site visitors see—such as promotions, new products, services or important notices—by placing them above the search results list and featuring them in a prominent way. Odds are you do this on your home page—why not on the search results pages too?

Preview results. The preview results feature allows site visitors to look at the destination page a search result links to from within the search results page. Thus, users can immediately see whether or not the result is the one that they wanted without ever having to leave the search engine results page, allowing them to save time and find what they want faster.

Custom look and feel. You've likely spent a lot of time and effort to make sure your site adheres to your company's branding principles. Why ruin that with search results pages that look nothing like your site? With Velocity, you can ensure that your search results pages look as good as the rest of your site.

Learn more about the Vivísimo Velocity Search Platform.