The KMW SEARCH AUDIT
Resolve complex search problems and unlock new opportunities with expert guidance from KMW’s team of search professionals.
The KMW Search Audit is designed to be comprehensive, yet efficient. We focus on quickly resolving pain points, simplifying operations and unlocking new opportunities by leveraging our accumulated experience, industry best practices and the latest offerings from the open source community. Here is just a sample of the outcomes our customers were able to achieve as a result of a Search Audit.
What we look at
Are you experiencing slow response times for certain queries? Does your search engine begin performing poorly when experiencing a spike in traffic? We will take a close look at problematic queries and identify bottlenecks in your solutions so you can serve your customers faster.
This includes things like:
- Performance testing & benchmarking
- Schema/mapping and analysis chain review
- Query structure review
- Assessment of hardware & supporting infrastructure
- Log analysis
- Memory utilization assessment
Is your search cluster fully utilizing your current hardware? How can your cluster topology be improved for better search performance? How does your search cluster scale ?
We will help ensure your search cluster is sized correctly and that your team is ready to scale accordingly.
What we review:
- Hardware and system resources
- Data volume, frequency of updates
- Fault tolerance and data availability requirements
- Index, sharding, and replica strategy
- Data distribution within cluster
- CPU, memory and I/O usage review
- Cluster sizing and scaling
As part of the audit, we look closely at the overall architecture of the technology solution and how the search engine is integrated. We will identify risks, recommended technology alternatives and identify any problematic bottlenecks or workflows.
Areas we pay attention to:
- Overall application architecture and components
- External component suitability and compatibility
- Integration points with other applications
- Search engine configuration
- Review of roadmap features and goals
- Review of any custom plugins
Whether you are performing bulk ingests of relatively static data or need to provide up-to-the minute updates to your search engine, we can help resolve pain points and performance issues related to indexing.
Areas we review include:
- Update frequency and data availability requirements
- Update/Commit strategies
- ETL ingestion process
- Data cleansing and normalization
- Data enrichment
- Data sources and source data models
Do you need help implementing a new feature or perhaps refining an existing one for a better user experience? Is your search engine retrieving the most relevant results for your users?
Areas we can assist with include:
- Search UI review
- Query structure review
- Query log analysis to identify common queries and zero result queries
- Spell Checking
- Autocomplete / Typeahead
- Faceting and filtering
- Teasers (static and dynamic)
- User behavior tracking
- Relevancy tuning
- Organization-specific synonym dictionaries and management
- Multi-language search and localization
We take a look at your operations and infrastructure to ensure your system can be easily monitored and maintained. In this area we look at:
- Monitoring and alerting
- Security (SSL, authentication, authorization)
- Disaster recovery and data retention policies
- DevOps automation and CI/CD
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