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Overview
Comprising 11 square miles in the heart of London, Camden is a borough of immense contrast and diversity. The Borough stretches from Hampstead Heath through Camden Town, Euston and Kings Cross to central London. There are around 198,000 residents, making up about 3% of London’s total population, with the majority less than 45 years of age.

The town hall is located near St Pancras train station and the council employees around 6,000 people in total.

In line with the UK Government’s e-government targets, Camden Borough Council has started delivering public services online. This is designed to improve service delivery for citizens and make local government more efficient and responsive to the needs of its customers.

The Challenge
Since the e-government agenda was announced, Camden has been leading the development of an open source content management system (CMS) – used to manage the content of a website or intranet – in conjunction with Red Hat. While building the CMS and website, Camden realized it would make it easier for visitors to the council’s website if they could use a search facility rather than try to navigate the site.

“We also had multiple websites running – such as www.mycamden, which gives you location-based information for any address in the borough – and we wanted to provide search across all sites and direct people quickly to the information they wanted, whichever Camden website they were visiting,” explains Pillai, technical project manager at Camden Borough Council.

The Solution
“My line manager at the time had read an article on the Google Search Appliance, so we decided to investigate further,” recalls Pillai. “We had a quick look around the market and came across other search providers, but nothing could do what Google offered, with minimum configuration.”

Camden’s own technical team were able to install the Google Search Appliance and, according to Pillai, it was a simple, painfree process. “We did it all ourselves and that’s the beauty of the Google Search Appliance,” says Pillai. “We plugged it in, went through a couple of steps, then it was up and running within an hour. Even better, it did not affect the performance or operation of the website at any time.”

The council choose to customise the search facility by providing sponsored links from internal departments and branding the search engine as Camden Borough Council rather than Google.

After discovering how easy it was to manage and use the search facility on the website, the council decided to purchase another GB-1001 for the new intranet it was developing. “We had experience using Google, so from the beginning we included the Google Search Appliance in the intranet design spec. Now, right at the top of the intranet you see a big search box, which makes it easier for our employees to find what they’re looking for.”

As members of staff can only view the intranet, the council has been able to include items such as the phone directory in the search engine. For the council’s 6,000 employees, this means that they only need to access one search interface to search across PDFs, directories and Web pages.

Results
“Our previous CMS offered basic search, but it had nowhere near the same functionality,” says Pillai. “There is also the benefit that people use Google, and know how it works.”

Interestingly, Camden has noticed that since adding Google search to the website, more people have been using the search facility to find content on its website. As a result, Pillai says: “We are thinking about making the search box more prominent on our screen. As soon as you put a lot of content on the site, navigation takes too long or you have to know which department you want to search.”

The popularity of Google Search Appliance offers Camden many opportunities to find out how other website operators are using the search engine. “Channel 4 and Apple both use Google Search Appliance on their website and we are always looking at what they are doing to see how we can improve our own.”

About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google’s award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. For more information, visit http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/.