主播大秀

As John Barratt the 主播大秀 Online search facility at has been relaunched.

This was the culmination of several years鈥� effort including a complete technology refresh, the formation of a new technical and product team in Salford and collaboration with many other teams across the 主播大秀 Future Media organisation.

With the relaunch of such a significant part of 主播大秀 Online we thought it would be interesting to give a more technical insight into the Search system.

The search results page is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind it is a system of software components centred around our search engines.

There are four key components within the Search system, shown in yellow below:

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Search engine

The search engine is the core of the service, responsible for finding the most appropriate content based on the words you type.

Text and other metadata (titles, URLs, etc) from pages and programmes is analysed and indexed so that results for searches can be found as quickly as possible.

We鈥檙e using third-party software to provide this core functionality, but we still have to understand how it works, what it can and can鈥檛 do so that we can tune and tailor it to suit our needs.

Ingest API

In order to find content we need to know about it. To enable this we鈥檝e implemented a component that provides an (API) so that the various content management systems used across 主播大秀 Online can send content as soon as it鈥檚 published.

Query API

Our Query API allows requests to be sent to the search engine. This is where queries are converted to the special syntax used by the search engine. It removes the need for different parts of 主播大秀 Online to understand how to interact with our specific search engine, and gives us the flexibility to upgrade and change it without听having any impact on听them.

Presentation

The presentation components provide the user interface people use to perform search queries.

These components know nothing about the content itself, how it鈥檚 organised or why certain results are showing 鈥� they simply focus on displaying the results the Query API gives them.

They include apps such as 主播大秀 iPlayer on phones, tablets and TVs, and the new search page at . This is a 鈥渞esponsive鈥� site, compatible with all current web browsers on computers, tablets and mobiles.

We recently helped the World Service team relaunch their search results pages too - they鈥檙e using our new search engine via the APIs on more than twenty sites in many different languages.

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System performance and resilience

We鈥檝e provisioned the new system to support current and expected traffic rates, and made it much more resilient to component failure - for example we now have separate copies of the system in two different data centres. We鈥檙e very happy to report that the new service is at least ten times faster than the old, delivering responses in less than half a second on average even at peak times when it鈥檚 dealing with upwards of thirty queries and over a hundred suggestion requests per second.

Monitoring

We now have real-time monitoring of all aspects of the system, so the 主播大秀鈥檚 24/7 Operations team can be notified immediately should any component fail or behave outside its expected boundaries. We also have 鈥淪earch TV鈥� on in the office showing the current status of the system and a sample of live search queries as a big tag cloud.

This necessary and comprehensive reengineering of the Search platform has meant that we could only provide core functionality in our first release, and that鈥檚 meant hard choices about removing features you may have been using. In future releases, we are looking forward to building on this solid foundation as we further enhance and improve the 主播大秀 Online Search experience.

Andy Webb is acting Technical Architect for 主播大秀 Search

Thanks to Mark Kay - Development Lead for 主播大秀 Search - who coauthored this post.