Optimizing an Educational Web Search System

Summary

The platform enables searching for universities and colleges in the US and Canada by different criteria. Educational institutions can buy leads provided by potential entrants. School graduates can search through thousands of colleges and universities and apply online from a single web resource.

The need

The customer is one of the largest search marketing firms in the US. It needed to broaden the range of services by providing information to universities and colleges about school graduates who might be interested in attending their educational organizations. The resource should have compiled a database of such candidates, which could be then provided to educational institutions. The school graduates should have been able to search for educational institutions and apply to as many of them as they wanted with a click of a button.

The challenges

The existing system was very complicated—the project consisted of 12–15 modules that were tightly coupled with each other. Therefore, it became hard to add new modules and functionality. There were issues with the entire system’s business logic and structure, and the Altoros team had to find solutions to problems that were even hard to identify.

The solution

The team had to examine the customer’s system from scratch. We reviewed each module and its code, exploring how they interact with other elements of the system. Each unit was carefully tested, which enabled the team to prevent similar problems in other parts of the system.

The engineers added university and college search functionality and an advanced back end with a great number of settings, levels of administration, various filters, advanced features for e-mail marketing, etc.

The outcome

Today, the customer is one of the largest providers of search marketing services. The company ranks among the top five largest search agencies in the country. Leveraging the expertise of Altoros in Java development, the company now provides marketing leads (future school graduates) and gains additional revenue from distributing this information to colleges and universities.