Great Ski Holidays

About Great ski holidays

Great ski holidays was created by Metaphor Search; a new enterprise search agency based in Newcastle upon Tyne. We like solving difficult search problems for a range of e-commerce, internet and intranet applications. We use a mixture of open source and in-house technologies for indexing, faceting, natural language processing, content classification and clustering, user and item-based recommendation engines and search analysis. But most importantly of all we use imagination.

Great Ski Holidays was first developed to showcase the use of a certain type of enterprise search created by us. It was never meant to be anything more than a demonstration site for prospective customers. However we love skiing a little bit too much and ended up creating Great Ski Holidays for real and then publishing it on the web so members of the public could use it. What better way to showcase our search technology than to have a real, live working site as its demonstration.

The story

In 2010 we created a new enterprise search application snappily called ADFT. ADFT stands for Authority Driven Facets Tags, which is a very fancy new way of doing enterprise search. We then tried to explain to a eager world just exactly what Authority Driven Faceted Tag based enterprise search is, why it is great and how it would make companies who use it a load of money. We really struggled. People did not "get it"; we could not explain it. We needed another approach other than explaining it again, only louder. We needed a compelling demonstration.

The human side of search

Great Ski Holidays is an example of an Authority Driven Faceted Tag search application. In everyday language this means you can search for ski resorts using the opinions and views of people you choose to trust. You can exclude people who you don't trust. The ability to choose search authorities allows site users to search using the language and word meanings most useful to them. They can search using their owm terms and phrases and get high quality results back.

If you are interested in finding out about how ADFT can improve your site's search then please get in touch; we'd love to hear from you.