When Global Search Lead Marc Desormeau took over the search team for Lenovo.com, he was confronted with a question, “Why is search not optimizing as much as we want it to?”
“We index half a million records every 12 hours. Everything from data feed and product information, pricing, catalogs, things we sell. We also index information about jobs at Lenovo, about our environmental policies, our technologies, and customer use cases so it’s quite the range. It’s a pretty broad mandate to support Lenovo.com,” said Desormeau.
Just prior to Desormeau joining the team, Lenovo had set out to replace the current search engine, a FAST-based solution that was quickly sunsetting. Reaching out to Gartner and Forrester for vetted possibilities, the search team learned about Lucidworks Fusion as an option. During an 18-month extended RFP process, multiple vendors were assessed. Meanwhile, the mandate of the desired search engine shifted from simple transactional support to enacting a full digital transformation at Lenovo.
“Ultimately based on Lucidworks’ vision around AI, their future plans for machine learning and more sophisticated search implementations, and really looking for a search platform that can take us into the future, the decision was made to move to Lucidworks Fusion.”
Fusion, built with open source Apache Solr and Apache Spark, changed Lenovo’s search experience. Fusion’s out-of-the-box tools allow flexibility and customization so results can be tailored specifically to a product line, location, language, user, and more.
As the new, flexible search platform proved it could be leveraged to help meet different departments’ goals, the Lenovo community became more engaged with search.
Fusion tools like a business rules editor and query pipelines helped the search team get more buy-in from across the company.
“We’re using data captured from our search engagements to inform some of our investments in SEM by looking at customers who are coming to us organically. How are they then engaging with our own site search? How can we start joining some of that data to ultimately present a better experience? So both in terms of attention and awareness that the search platform is more than just a little box on the screen, it’s actually providing a lot of insights into our customers,” says Desormeau. “People are starting to understand there’s some real data here that’s valuable, and we can use that to present our customers with a better experience.”