Service: re-engineering
Solution type: web application
Business area: internet, search engines, B2B services
Customer: Web marketing consultancy WebGuerrilla provides customized marketing solutions to help clients increase their online visibility and attract qualified traffic
Period: 2002
Key problems
WebGuerrilla had developed customized visibility programs for dozens of clients ranging from large corporations to start-up entrepreneurs. In its work, WebGuerrilla used the following ways: improving the site's positions in major search engines, submitting information about the site to directories and industry portals, establishing inbound links to the site from related sites, developing and managing paid search engine placement programs.
Among the solutions which WebGuerrilla offered to its clients is a search engine that allows to search the contents of the site and of other relevant sites. The search engine allows to build quickly and efficiently an index of quality content on a specific topic or category. WebGuerrilla's customers could place the search engine on their sites to attract more site visitors. However, the customers usually required modifications to the engine, so that the engine would better suit their specific needs. One particular request was to make the engine's relevance algorithm adjustable, so that it would be possible and easy to customize the order in which the search results would be returned.
Since software development was not a core competency of WebGuerrilla, a decision to outsource the engine modifications was adopted. After a successfully performed pilot project, Arcadia was selected for the job. By organizing its relationship with Arcadia via Planet Software, WebGuerrilla had the convenience and security of dealing with an American business with the added benefit of a much lower development cost.
Solution
Arcadia, Inc. assigned a dedicated development team to the WebGuerrilla's project (an offshore software development center, or ODC). Arcadia's developers carefully examined the C code of the search engine. Most of the modifications required not-so-big changes to the code. However, the relevance algorithm modification was so significant that it could only be implemented by complete re-writing of a big portion of the code, including that of the file database of the engine.
Thus, one third of the development time was dedicated to the relevance algorithm upgrade. The rest of the time was devoted to smaller adjustments to the search engine. So far, 16 successive versions of the search engine have been built, each of the versions contained 3-4 newly implemented adjustments. Also, the development team built four versions of the search engine with the upgraded relevance algorithm. WebGuerrilla has been very much satisfied with the course of the project and plans to continue the partnership with Arcadia.
Technologies used
- FREE BSD
- GNU C
- TCP/IP
- Apache
- PHP
Duration and scope
14 person-months