September 23, 2019

Easily Search Through Large Data Collections With Azure Architecture


Business Case:

Our client, a multinational technology company, offers numerous online learning courses for its premium customers. The customers’ employees rely on these courses to improve their skills and remain competitive in a modern business environment.

Our client’s previous course management system was cumbersome. Searching through the thousands of learning courses was a slow process. Users could only find courses if they knew exactly what they were looking for.

Our client needed a solution that made course searchability quick and easy. The solution also needed be scalable to account for future growth.

Key Challenges:

  Improve browsing capability on our client’s course platform with a scalable solution 
  Implement enhanced search so users can search a course’s internal content (such as descriptions or video subtitles)
  Improve the relevance of search results 

Our Solution:

To improve search results for users, we built end-to-end architecture powered by Azure Search.

Solution Design:

In our solution, our client’s course details are stored in an Azure Cosmos database. To save time and manual effort, we implemented incremental indexing using change data capture. By leveraging scoring profiles, our custom solution improves search ranking and relevance.

Within this Azure architecture, we implemented native search capabilities, faceted filtering, sorting, auto-complete, and pagination. We integrated rapid free-form text search so the solution would support fuzzy search based on similarly constructed terminology. The solution is both robust and scalable, offering users results that align with their varied needs.

Business Outcomes:

With the new Azure Search-powered architecture, users can easily find the courses they are looking for. Users can refine results by technology, video duration, and difficulty using a rich filtering system. The easy filtering experience encourages more users to actively complete the courses, boosting their technical competence. Increased speed and result accuracy have led to higher user satisfaction.

Highlights

  Created Azure Search solution that enables users to easily search through thousands of online courses 
  Improved search speed and accuracy, reducing page load time by 90%
  Developed scalable architecture to account for future growth