High Monkey and Funnelback Launch CVTC Search

Last month, High Monkey wrapped up a project for Chippewa Valley Technical College (CVTC) that implemented Funnelback—an innovative search technology—with their existing Kentico 9 software. This project was the first of its kind for High Monkey and Funnelback in the US. This project integrates Funnelback’s robust search technology with High Monkey’s findability practices to provide CVTC with an easy-to-use, flexible search implementation. Both High Monkey and Funnelback are excited about this project rollout and opportunities to provide the same level of service to other current and future clients.

The project included two critical components to creating a successful solution:

Funnelback Implementation:

Earlier this year, High Monkey proposed CVTC implement Funnelback’s search and analytics tool. The toolset provides a robust search experience and for many organizations like CVTC, it provides deep analytics to assist in better customer understanding and maintain mandated content compliance for their web properties. High Monkey was able to seamlessly integrate the Funnelback search engine into CVTC’s extensive search practices, having already implemented a new strategy to greatly improve their overall search experience and implement a more solid digital content strategy. The inclusion of the Funnelback search engine, allowed both CVTC and High Monkey to further enhance this strategy and provide additional flexibility for future changes and needs.

Kentico Integration

To integrate Funnelback with Kentico’s Content Management System, High Monkey’s team developed custom web parts to crawl the necessary content and display search results on the CVTC website, www.cvtc.edu.

Custom Response

The custom response web part allows data stored in the Kentico database as pages to be output as XML or JSON REST API Feeds. Unlike the out-of-the-box Kentico REST API, these custom feeds integrate with additional metadata schemes setup in the CMS which when delivered can provide search visitors with a much richer contextual navigation process. Each deployed webpart can be configured to provide a specific set of data based on the types of content used in the creation of the CVTC website pages.

Search Display

The search display web part pulls in the search results from the Funnelback system based on visitor searches. This integration allows for full utilization of the comprehensive results display templating from Funnelback while seamlessly displaying in the Kentico website.