When people need information on domestic or international disaster relief, health and safety, or community services for the needy, they typically think of the American Red Cross, America's premier non-profit emergency response organization. When the Red Cross was struggling with sub-optimal search, it turned to the Google Search Appliance to improve information “findability,” both for internal and external users. The American Red Cross opens up information to user communities, improving search for people in need and those helping them with the Google Search Appliance
Organization
Since visionary Clara Barton founded it in 1881, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Part of a worldwide movement that offers neutral humanitarian care for victims of war, the American Red Cross also distinguishes itself by aiding victims of devastating natural disasters. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services in five other areas: community services that help the needy; support and comfort for military members and their families; the collection, processing and distribution of half the blood supply in the United States; educational programs such as lifeguarding and CPR that promote health and safety; and international relief and development programs.
As one of the world’s largest non-profits, the American Red Cross relies on its public-facing websites and its intranet to keep millions of people and tens of thousands of employees and volunteers informed. The main external website, redcross.org, sees significant traffic from people seeking information on everything from CPR and lifeguard certification class schedules to information about disasters such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
“Our websites underpin everything we do. On a normal day, we get up to 200,000 hits on our main website, redcross.org – but that number swells to millions during a national disaster,” says Ivan Chou, Web Applications Engineer for the American Red Cross. “During a disaster, we may switch from our regular front page to an emergency template and immediately begin populating it with content such as ways to help or donate or get into contact with family members and friends.”
With such a heavy reliance on the web for delivering information, the American Red Cross needed a faster search tool that would deliver better results. The organization had been relying on a previously purchased search solution that also came bundled with its new Content Management System (CMS) implemented in 2009. It used a meaning-based context model driven by questions, phrases, or sentences versus keywords – but this approach was not delivering relevant results. “We found that most users search on keywords, not concepts,” says Chou. “Even so, we brought in the vendor to help configure our former product to return keyword-relevant search results. After a lot of effort, it still didn’t work out.”
Chou reports that the connector linking the previous search engine to the CMS was slow. Due to the performance of the CMS product, it could take up to ten seconds for search results to be returned. Slow search performance and lack of relevant search results prompted the American Red Cross to investigate other search alternatives – an initiative that coincided with a redesign for www.redcross.org and creation of www.measlesiniative.org, a new site supporting a multi-agency push to help halt the spread of measles worldwide. "From a content standpoint, we were starting the Measles Initiative site over from scratch, and we planned to have a wealth of resources – photo galleries, videos, and other materials in multiple languages. We had to find a better way for people worldwide to search and find relevant information. It was key to the overall success of the initiative," says Abi Weaver, Senior Press Officer for the International Services Department of the American Red Cross.
At the same time as slow performance and low-quality search results were plaguing the two external sites, the same issues were prevalent on the organization’s intranet site, Crossnet, which also used the Autonomy old search engine. In addition to issues with search, employees first had to select a category for their pertinent line of business – community services, educational programs, international relief, and so on – before they could navigate to the appropriate intranet page. “Even after they chose a line-of-business category and started to drill down into content, users still struggled to make search work quickly and efficiently and get relevant results on our intranet,” says Chou.
