CUSTOMER STORYEmpowering professional associations with engaging search.

How a technology provider for medical associations replaced their search platform in record time and exceeded customer expectations.

“When associations come to us with a new tuning request, we can say with confidence, ‘Give me two hours, we’ll have that done and we’ll be able to test.'” — Tim DeFoggi, CTO, Celerate

When ads force a quick change

Celerate empowers non-profit medical and scientific organizations to reach strategic business goals through progressive technology. The company creates software that manages content, learning, and membership services for prestigious medical professional associations like the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Physical Therapy Association.

Using Celerate’s software, association members can stay current with developments in their field through trainings, case studies, and content that answers questions about symptoms, diagnoses, and procedures. But when Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE) began requiring ads alongside search results, Celerate’s clients demanded a change—and gave them just two months to implement it.

The DIY dilemma

For many years, Celerate had relied on Google Search Appliance (GSA) and later Google’s Custom Search Engine to power their search features. With the sudden need to switch, Tim DeFoggi, CTO at Celerate, was faced with a critical decision.

DeFoggi had previous experience with Apache Solr, an open-source search platform known for its power and flexibility. But he also knew that building a custom Solr implementation from scratch would push them well past their tight two-month deadline.

“I don’t even want to think about that. We would have spent so much more money and time developing it ourselves.” — Tim DeFoggi, CTO, Celerate

What Celerate needed was a development framework to make Solr implementation faster and easier without sacrificing capabilities. After researching several options, they discovered the Lucidworks Platform.

Finding the right solution

While evaluating alternatives, Celerate found that many competing products were attempting to be direct GSA replacements but still used a “black box” approach for relevance with limited ability to fine-tune results. Having experienced those limitations before, they wanted something different.

Lucidworks offered the flexibility they needed, with the added security of knowing that if they ever wanted to move away from the platform, the underlying Solr index would still be available for use.

With the deadline looming, Celerate quickly began implementing the Lucidworks Platform. In less than two months—meeting their tight timeline—they were up and running with the new search platform.

Exceeding expectations

When the cutover from Google to Lucidworks occurred, the response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. “They were blown away by how fast it was,” DeFoggi says of their customers’ reactions.

The speed improvement wasn’t just a technical victory—it was a transformative user experience upgrade for association members who rely on quick access to medical and scientific information in their daily work.

This initial success had another unexpected benefit: it sparked greater engagement with search as a strategic tool. After seeing Lucidworks’ capabilities, Celerate’s customers became more invested in continually fine-tuning their search results to better serve their members.

When DeFoggi attended Activate, the annual search and AI conference produced by Lucidworks, the American Academy of Ophthalmology even sent along a list of questions about how to get the most out of the new platform—a level of engagement they hadn’t seen with the previous search solution.

From manual to automated intelligence

With the legacy Google deployment, search facets were hard-coded, requiring significant manual effort. When initially deploying the Lucidworks Platform, the Celerate team hand-tagged everything to duplicate the previous search experience.

But as their confidence in Lucidworks has grown, they’ve increasingly leveraged its auto-faceting capabilities. The platform helps with tagging to train and improve document classification, and different pipelines make implementation straightforward.

This has dramatically improved Celerate’s response time to customer requests.

“When associations come to us with a new tuning request, we can say with confidence, ‘Give me two hours, we’ll have that done and we’ll be able to test.'” — Tim DeFoggi, CTO, Celerate

The future of association search

Looking ahead, Celerate has ambitious plans to leverage more of Lucidworks’ capabilities. Their ultimate goal is to make query results increasingly personalized and provide the most relevant data to each user.

By authenticating association members, they’ll be able to deliver customized search results based on individual profiles and behaviors. For training support, they plan to analyze courses each member has taken and provide reading suggestions to help improve performance in areas of weakness.

Celerate also intends to harness Lucidworks’ analytics capabilities to provide actionable insights back to their client organizations. For example, identifying when “members aren’t doing well on these tests” can help associations know where to implement additional training modules or where resources might be deficient.

The rapid implementation of the Lucidworks Platform has given Celerate not just a replacement for their previous search tool but a foundation for innovation. Features like signals, pipeline processing, and different collections—which would have required substantial custom development—were available out of the box.

“With Lucidworks pipelines, it’s simple and easy to do,” DeFoggi notes, emphasizing how the platform has allowed them to focus on creating value rather than building infrastructure.

By meeting their two-month deadline while delivering a superior search experience, Celerate has transformed a potential crisis into an opportunity, strengthening their relationships with prestigious medical associations and positioning themselves for continued innovation in how professional associations connect their members with critical knowledge.

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By implementing the Lucidworks Platform in less than two months, Celerate transformed how major medical associations like the American Academy of Ophthalmology access professional content—proving that with the right technology partner, even the tightest deadlines can become opportunities for exceptional client experiences.