Not searching, finding

Visitors to your website may press a Search button but they don't want to search, they want to find. What they don't want to find is a long list of text matches of little relevance to what they need to know. Perhaps the design offers searches of particular database fields. This reflects what you think people want to search on not, perhaps, what they need to know.

The visitor may need the single best answer to a query: What is the diagnosis? Which is the most suitable product? In other cases, where a search returns a number of individual results, the visitor wants an answer which is a combination of them. For example, instead of a list of possible options requiring multiple individual booking transactions, a complete travel itinerary with available flights, car hire and accommodation is required.

If you started a project from scratch you might attempt to incorporate this type of intelligence by means of an expert system. This has its own problems. It requires specialist skills, uses technology which is not part of mainstream web development and is hugely time-consuming. Furthermore, you are not starting from scratch, you already have company databases which structure information in the way your other commercial applications require.

Lir has the answer. Working with existing databases, scripting languages and web servers, our patented editable rule-base tools allow you to add intelligence to your web applications providing better targeted information to your visitors.