When American Express chose Endeca as their new search vendor, we had the opportunity to improve the site-wide search engine's interface and functionality. This was a major undertaking considering there are 2 million pages in the U.S. and U.K. versions of americanexpress.com across 88 servers, with a mix of database-driven content and static HTML.
By researching Endeca's previous work, I identified the functionality that would best meet our business needs while allowing users to find the most relevant content in the fewest clicks. The search engine now features guided navigation (results organized into categories that match the site architecture), as well as suggested links, spell-check and synonym suggestions, and contextually relevant cross-sell.
Migrating to the new vendor also enabled American Express to exclude outdated collections and improve upon reporting (e.g., click-through rates, search queries with no results). All press releases are now suppressed by default.
View the American Express search engine |
