14 DAY TRIAL // The football craze is still raging all over the world, in fact it’s getting worse as the competition heats up. The 2010 World Cup has already pushed Internet traffic to its all-time highs, and is pushing Twitter to the brink of collapse, so websites that can expect this sort of traffic have to be prepared.
You can imagine that FIFA.com is going to be a popular destination for at least a few more weeks so the site turned to Google to power its search features. Interestingly, it didn’t go with the cloud-based services and opted instead for the old school approach with the Google Search Appliance.
“With the Google Search Appliance, FIFA.com is able to provide a user-centric, universal search experience across all types of content—news, statistics, images and videos,” Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search, wrote.
“For instance, when you type in ‘Messi,’ you first see a box at the top showing ‘player statistics,’ followed by FIFA news results in order of relevance, then images and videos specifically pertaining to Messi. Additionally, features like ‘Did you mean’ direct people to the right results. For instance, if you type in ‘mesi,’ FIFA.com will ask you if you meant ‘Messi’,” he added.
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides many of the features that the regular Google search provides, as exemplified by the company above. However, it offers extended flexibility and more piece of mind for IT admins of large companies or websites, as it can be deployed on site. On the one hand, the searches themselves can be customized in various ways to meet the unique needs of the client.
On the other hand, the search features are not dependant on Google’s infrastructure with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings. There are plenty of reasons why a company may want to use the GSA for internal search, that is what it was built for in the first place, but the custom-built servers can be adapted to serve websites as well.
In this particular case, it may be hard to determine how much of the choice was down to practical considering and how much it was based on marketing. There are plenty of advantages to having your company’s logo on FIFA.com, like Google has, and FIFA was definitely in need of robust search capabilities, so maybe it was a mutually beneficial deal.