Penn Foster has selected SearchStax Site Search product to replace the existing search function on Penn Foster’s website. The new technology will help provide more relevant search results to students, enable Penn Foster’s marketing team to monitor and manage search without IT intervention, and free IT to focus on other activities.

SearchStax, a fully managed Solr-as-a-Service platform, will provide Penn Foster the search back-end infrastructure with its Managed Solr solution as well as the search front end with Site Search User Experience Accelerator and Site Search analytics and management console.

“Our alternative to SearchStax technology was a large-scale internal development effort. And even with a substantial investment, that development would have given us a fraction of the capabilities we are getting. For instance, we wouldn’t have a user-centric UI that puts marketing in control. We would have no analytics. And marketing would have had to continually rely on development to tweak search,” said Chad Smith, Senior Application Developer.

Penn Foster’s marketing team will leverage Site Search analytics and its many search optimization capabilities to make sure students always get the most relevant search results on the first page.

Smith leads the front-end development on Penn Foster’s web properties on Sitecore and .NET.