De Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij
How many minutes do your employees spend per day in the office searching for information? This can be reduced with an optimal search experience!
For Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM), we help 30,000 employees find the right information. To do this, we connected various information sources and developed an internal search engine.
Internal search engine optimization
KLM is the national airline and one of the largest ten employers in the Netherlands. There was frustration among employees that finding the right information was a difficult task.
With that in mind, a hackaton chose a kind of Google for KLM as the best idea. Then the project called MySearch was created to build the proof of concept into an enterprise search service that would allow employees to search for information faster, better and with less frustration.
The search service is divided into four parts. A standalone frontend, a search API, an admin tool and an Elasticsearch cluster. In doing so, Luminis has worked primarily on the last three.
The search API handles search queries and then returns results. This API is also available for other applications within KLM. Within a search query, users can specify a context within which the search results should fall, such as language and content type.
Also, the department they work in, which is derived from their logged-in account, can be used to rank more relevant content higher. The admin tool is used to retrieve content from various sources within KLM and index it in Elasticsearch to make it searchable.
In addition, various things to improve relevance can be managed, such as synonyms, compound words and query parameters. By using analytics, the search and click behavior of users is examined and from there an attempt is made to improve relevance. This can be done, for example, by making a particular field in which the search terms appear more important, or making older content of a particular type, such as news, less relevant.
