By Matthew Abbott
When you perform a search using Google, you’re not actually searching the internet. You’re searching a cache, most likely the biggest cache in the world – an index of documents that Google has assembled.
Google, over the past 20 years has engineered a solution that is designed to deliver millions of search results, in fractions of a second, and they do this because the user-experience matters – getting results to the user as fast as possible is a feature of Google’s search engine product. And the psychology of page speed perception has shown us how important fast results are to customers. [1]
In the Travel industry, our challenge is really specific – users are searching to find their perfect holiday. What this means to us as a technology partner is aggregating hundreds of potential bed banks and flight suppliers to find the best deals for customers. But doing this takes time, and requires a deep set of integrations that make this data available.
And this is where cache technology gives us an advantage – it means we can respond to the customer queries quickly and efficiently whilst providing a massive volume of holiday packages to choose from.
The DealFinder provides instant search results for holiday packages (hotels and flights) and augments this rich data with a broad set of search capabilities.
With DealFinder, we can return a lot of search results, with just a few bits of information, and we can start turning the narrative of holiday search from:
“I want to go to Majorca, departing on the 15th August, returning on the 22nd August, flying from Gatwick or Heathrow and my children are 8 and 11 years old” to: “I want a beach holiday in August”
The simplicity of DealFinder’s search capabilities means there is less friction for a potential customer trying to find their holiday. Combine this simple search with filtering on meal bases, price bands, TripAdvisor ratings, star ratings, and destinations (with the ability to drill-down through geography levels) to allow the customer to start really wide, but narrow their results very quickly.
Much like Google, we have made speed a feature of the DealFinder – we can search through hundreds of millions of results, in under 300 milliseconds (this is the response time delivered for 95% of calls) allowing a website that uses the DealFinder cache to be fast and fluid.
Caches, historically, have always been challenging – how can you build and maintain a massive cache of holiday packages that is up-to-date and inexpensive to correct in error? Our DealFinder architecture is designed specifically to be a robust but agile caching solution, with support for on-the-fly pricing, and intra-day incremental updates.
DealFinder represents a new way of thinking about caching and searching for that perfect holiday.
Much like Google, we have made speed a feature of the DealFinder – we can search through hundreds of millions of results, in under 300 milliseconds (this is the response time delivered for 95% of calls) allowing a website that uses the DealFinder cache to be fast and fluid
– Matthew Abbott, Software Architect at intuitive
DealFinder stands on cutting-edge technology, including Microsoft’s .NET Core platform and Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure. By leveraging AWS Lambda, DealFinder can scale cache-build operations and presents the cache through a high-performance API. DealFinder cache technology allows pricing on-the-fly and incremental updates, enabling travel companies to deliver an extremely fast cache-first search that stays up-to-date.
Want to know more about DealFinder and how it can turbo-charge the search capabilities on your website? We are hosting a Webinar on Thursday 10 December 2020 at 3pm
[1]: How Page Load Speed Affects Customer Behavior – Business.com – June 30th 2020 – https://www.business.com/articles/website-page-speed-affects-behavior/
