View a live demo of the Google Search Appliance

Overview
From its headquarters in Leeds, Contactmusic.com has built a dynamic entertainment site geared to young, Internet-savvy, entertainment hungry surfers eager to stay current with music, movies, videogames and each other.

Now in its sixth year, the company's business model is to create a dynamic webzine that covers all areas of the entertainment sector - predominantly music, movies and computer gaming. The company's business model is based on advertising, and is about to expand to MP3 downloads. Other plans for the next year include mobile content delivery, i.e. news and audio direct to mobile phones. The site claims over 2 million unique users, who access some 9 million pages per month.

The Challenge
Contactmusic.com was developed in Lotus Notes/Domino, says Commercial Director Antony Johnson. That made sense technologically for the kinds of documents they serve, which currently include html pages, video and audio streams and MP3 downloads. But he says that "The available search products for Domino are very expensive and don’t necessarily give the desired results." What's more, he continues, the avid fans constituting Contactmusic.com's audience demand fast and easy access across the site. "Our content is driven by music and film stars who release many products. We need to get users to their desired destination quickly. Each artist also is featured on his own 'homepage' where users can find everything on their desired artist displayed by time/relevance and need these to be displayed at the top in the search results."

Because "all Domino solutions are resource intensive" - and in Johnson's view, didn't provide the best search results - he knew that to keep users happy, he needed to gain full control over the search facility on the site. In particular, he says he had three goals: To display results that resided in separate databases; provide more accurate search results for every query; and "offer the same quality people are used to from Google."

The Solution
Recognizing the need for a new solution, Johnson searched on Google - and that is how he learned about the Google Search Appliance.

"Installation of the box was very quick," recalls Antony Johnson. "There were a few technical issues with Lotus Domino that had to be addressed, which Google offered great support to resolve." The next step was to crawl the entire site. "The Google Search Appliance gave the correct priority to the correct areas," he says, and after seeing initial results, his team "altered the website design to make it more spider-friendly and linked into it from every page" of the 77,500 documents on the company's four servers.

"Most Domino search solutions are integrated into Domino and perform on the database end, not the web end," Johnson says. "As the Google Search Appliance is totally independent, it has no resource cost to the web servers or hardware."

Results
"The Google Search Appliance has unarguably improved the quality of search on our site," Johnson says. "The support team has been more than helpful from the very beginning through today. Their level of interest and ability has not changed." And when considering the Contactmusic.com customer base, he adds that "Most web users need no education regarding 'how to use Google', and we have seen new users come in who had noticed Google as a new search facility had been added."

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/.