WAND has made a lot of noise lately in the search world. The company recently announced that it has expanded the scope of its taxonomy expertise by creating custom sets of tags and keywords associated with product and service categories. The data can help clients' websites keep up with the Web 2.0 phenomenon by adding metadata to company profiles, blogs, product reviews, catalog pages and video clips. The tags can also yield more intelligent and responsive keyword-based searches of digital assets, according to WAND. The tags can be integrated with the WAND product and service taxonomy to combine benefits of structured and unstructured search.
In separate news, WAND has collaborated with European information services provider Telegate to launch a local search service in Germany. WAND provided more than 180,000 keywords to Telegate's system of 8,000 headings to help users yield the most relevant results from their searches. Prior to working with WAND, Telegate produced failed searches for many of its users.
To solve that problem, WAND matched Telegate's business categories to its taxonomy to produce a large amount of synonyms that could be included in the Telegate database. WAND also analyzed Telegate's query logs to find missed searches and extract additional search terms to include in its taxonomy. Now, more than two out of three searches that previously failed yield relevant results for users.
Both of these announcements certainly illustrate the value of WAND's services in a world where Internet search and Web 2.0 are top of mind with every company that has an Internet-based businesses. Creating a service that helps these companies better handle Web 2.0 technology is a smart move by WAND. Many organizations still don't know how to adapt their sites to take advantage of everything related to Web 2.0 and will likely welcome this helping hand from the experts at WAND. While they can't (or don't want to) do it themselves, they certainly recognize the urgency to have such capabilities. As word continues to get out about this new offering, it will undoubtedly become one of WAND's most popular services.
WAND's partnership with Telegate should also benefit the company in both the long and short term as Web customers of all sizes and locations strive to make their search functionality the best it can be. They realize that users are going to bypass their sites if they can't find exactly what they are looking for, and find it quickly. Having great search functionality on your site is a necessity, not an option, these days. And WAND is certainly well-positioned to capitalize on that trend.