MSF Tukul search evolution

MSF - Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is an humanitarian independent organization that provides medical and humanitarian help in about 63 countries around the world.
MSF provides assistance when catastrophic events — such as armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, or natural disasters — overwhelm local health systems. MSF also assists people who face discrimination or neglect from their local health systems or when populations are otherwise excluded from health care.

"Tukul 2 has been created applying user-center-design principles; it is fully coherent with the MSF brand, it has a very neat and readable interface, and it offers different styles of navigation designed around users need and behaviour. The new MSF Intranet features include a Facebook-style user directory, an intelligent usage of metadata, the innovative multilngual files management features, working spaces for open groups and various tools for information sharing and management. It also offers a "light" version for mobile devices and limited resources connections."

During summer 2010, Reflab has worked to the development of the new "Tukul search". This evolution of the Tukul project is the first that addresses the success the project is having: total shared documents went from about 10000 (in 2009) to more than 30.000 after one year since initial launch.

The new search allows full-text search on all main internal sources of MSF International (federated search): main repository, workspaces, internal catalogues and manuals as well as external sources such as the MSF International Website and Reliefweb.

The new search supports: faceted search based on MSF custom metadata, direct access to main services (example: missions, contacts, etc. of a country, when typing the first letters of the country), sort by date or relevance.

In particular relevance has been configured and tweaked based on search statistics and user intent, and leveraging the rich metadata set used by MSF.

For this project, we have used Solr as the search engine for internal sources and Yahoo Boss for the public sources.