Royal & SunAlliance Googles its intranet

Insurance group Royal & SunAlliance has replaced its intranet search engine with Google's Search Appliance, allowing users to get to information faster.

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According to Royal & SunAlliance knowledge manager Tony Brierley, the replacement has reduced search times from between five and seven minutes to between 0.2 and 0.4 seconds.

The intranet is used by the company's underwriters to pull up information when dealing with brokers' enquiries. Underwriters require information such as rates or company policy guidelines that is stored on the intranet.

Brierley told silicon.com the company had a legacy of different search tools within the intranet, which is based on a Lotus Notes backbone. Interoperability problems between these systems slowed searches to an unacceptable level.

Brierley said: "Users told us that the information they found was good, but finding it was often impossible. Feedback on the Google application has been very good. People say they can actually find things now."

Brierley said the Google Search Appliance has improved the quality of information that is available on the intranet, because it allows users to view PDF and PowerPoint documents. It also self-calibrates every 24 hours, stripping out links to documents that no longer exist and 'spidering' new entries so that they are available to users.

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The system deals with more than 7,000 searches a day and Brierley is more confident that the majority of those are now yielding results that are useful to RSA underwriters.

He said: "It's difficult to measure what the improvement is in terms of productivity, but the associated quality of responses from users means it's good news for us. It's essential that individuals get the right results at the right time and it's delightful that the intranet is doing just that."