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Challenge |
Overview
Seattle-based Sur La Table is a premier kitchenware
company offering top quality cookware and hard-to-find kitchen tools
for culinary professionals and home chefs.
Sur La Table launched in 1972 with its first retail store and a mail
order catalog that now reaches more than eight million consumers worldwide.
In 1999, in response to escalating demand for its extensive collection
of culinary products, Sur La Table launched an e-commerce and gift registry
website at www.surlatable.com.
The number of products in the kitchenware industry increases daily,
and finding the right product isn't always easy. Fast, accurate search
results are fundamental in helping Sur La Table customers locate the
products they're looking for so they can make informed purchasing decisions.
The Challenge
Sur La Table needed a search solution for its e-commerce
websites and employee intranet that was flexible, affordable, and easy
to implement. Because kitchenware products with names like Wüsthof
and Le Creuset can be a challenge to spell, Sur La Table also needed
a search engine that would correct spelling mistakes for its customers.
Sur La Table's e-commerce site offers more than 20,000 different kitchenware
items across three websites. On an average day, www.surlatable.com will
host more than 15,000 simultaneous users, and at peak times nearly 200,000.
The Sur La Table intranet includes a wide variety of HTML, PDF, and
Microsoft Office documents.
Sur La Table's main e-commerce pages are dynamically generated, which
makes them difficult for traditional Web crawlers to index. A search
solution was required that would work across multiple sites generated
by different third-party products. "Several alternate vendors were
unable to provide us with any assurance that their product would effectively
index our different sites," explains Jonathan Grant, Sur La Table's
lead web developer.
The Solution
Sur La Table deployed Google's GB-1001 to simplify search
for customers and employees. "The Google Search Appliance met all
our needs," says Grant. "There wasn't another vendor that
could search all of our web and intranet content and perform to the
same level as Google in relevance and spelling."
Because the Google Search Appliance gives administrators access to Google
results as an XML data feed, Grant was able to integrate the results
easily into a Cold Fusion environment. Pointing the Google Search Appliance
at an offline product database, Grant then mapped the search results
to live URLs using a few simple scripts. Besides avoiding redundancy
errors that would otherwise occur on Sur La Table's template-driven
site, this solution resulted in significant cost savings. "The
Google box is based so heavily on open standards that it was easy to
pull something like this together," Grant explains. "This
is the beauty of the product to me." 1
"The Google Search Appliance is half the cost of competing products
and delivers the most accurate search results," Grant explains.
"Everyone at Sur La Table is excited about how Google can help
grow our business by enabling our employees and customers to quickly
and easily find the products and information they need."
End Result
"I really liked the fact that Google let me test
the product for 30 days before making the final decision to buy it,"
continues Grant. "The benefits were clear from the moment we got
Google up and running on our network. The Google Search Appliance made
it easier for our customers to make informed purchasing decisions, it
saved us money, and it's been critical in helping Sur La Table meet
its 2002 revenue goals."
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.
1 Quoted in InternetWeek, June 18, 2002.
Contact sales for more information.
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