Automotive

Audi’s online presence now has a practical search function.

Surfers can now find highly relevant results as easily as when using the “real“ Google.

Visitors to the Web site of the Ingolstadt-based car manufacturer Audi can find out about the latest car models, events and the company itself. To spare them the all-too-familiar experience of obtaining unproductive search results, Audi has decided to implement technology from the Internet’s most successful search engine.

Audi had its own in-house Web management tool with a search function that could be manually optimized by entering keywords and catchphrase rules. This approach proved too time-consuming for the editorial staff, however. Moreover, the hit rate was very unsatisfactory. “The editorial staff wanted to save time,“ remembers Volker Scholtz, Customer Portal Coordinator at Audi in Ingolstadt. At the time we

were implementing the content management system “Day“ at Audi and suggested using the Google Search Appliance (GSA). “We compared the old search engine and GSA directly by examining the results found for the top ten search terms using each tool. Using GSA, search results for the term ‘winter tires’, for example, included links to order some, while the other tool only returned press releases,“ says Scholz. The new CMS and GSA were introduced at the same time in August 2005.

“Customers trust the brand name Google and associate it with high standards,“ says Scholz. Audi expects that the tool will be continuously improved. Hardware and operation of the solution are externally hosted by us. Once all the details were ironed out in meetings beforehand, it took four weeks to implement the new search engine. “We adapted the application to Audi’s layout; after all, users are not supposed to feel they have left our Web site,“ explains Scholz.

Customizing the search results meant developing a function that filters content according to different “collections“, or certain sections of the site. GSA searches many pages in the CMS, but shows only those that actually may be provided to www.audi.de. The results have been assigned appropriate definitions to make them more relevant for end customers. “Users are happy because GSA is real added value,“ says Scholz. He adds that GSA has earned Audi top marks in terms of competition, as it receives very few queries anymore about information not found.

GSA is being implemented by one of our teams specialized in Web site optimization. Google Germany has been offering firms its search engine technology in the areas of Web site search and knowledge management since 2005. Services relating to the product are provided by partners. “We have access to new technology before others do,“ says Morten Faust, Project Manager at T-Systems, whose team works closely with Google within the framework of their Enterprise Professional Partnership. “Companies want to offer their customers and employees the same online experience that the ‘big Google’ provides, by delivering only relevant search results.“

The Google Search Appliance consists of a hardware and software package that searches a company’s content in over 220 different file formats and in all languages. The GSA creates a master index of all documents, enabling Google’s search technology to find the file immediately. To keep it up to date, the engine searches the pages at specified intervals. Pages that are modified more often are also searched more often.

At the moment, Audi is busy with several thousand pages of content, among them many PDF files and Word documents, containing such information as delivery times and brief descriptions. However, this is only the beginning. “Within the next two to three years we expect a rapid rise in files,“ says Scholz. In an ambitious plan, the car manufacturer wants to host the pages of all its importers and international dealers, so as to help the 100 or so importers to rapidly create Web sites in their own language and in keeping with corporate identity. At the moment, Web sites are being set up in Ireland and the UK, but soon Italy, Japan and the US are to follow suit. Audi reckons that the process of integrating new countries will take about one man-day. According to Scholz, ROI considerations have not played a role in the search engine project, as there is no direct savings potential: This is about pure service.

In the future, the Audi Web site will attract not only visitors interested in buying a new car, but also those who already own one. The site offers an increasing number of technical documents that are important to end customers. “The Internet is becoming more and more important as a service channel. As the breadth and depth of content grows, we can’t expect customers to browse our Web site using the navigation bar alone. We have to provide them with highly sophisticated tools.“ concludes Scholz.