Search Enhancements - Change Notice

csmith · August 2, 2016, 4:44pm

As of the Wednesday 27th July, the following search enhancements will be available:

All search. You are now able to search across Company, Officer and Officer Disqualification with a single search request, through a GET /search request.
Previous company names and other officer name searching. Search now considers a companies previous names, or other names an officer may be appointed as when satisfying the search.
Dissolved company names. Dissolved company names are now considered, but are given less significance than equivalently matching active company names. The last six years of dissolved companies will be available.
Improved indexing. We have redesigned our data indexing to improve accuracy and the promotion of the most relevant matches.
Improved summary information. The result summary field snippet now returns the correct context information, describing, for example, the previous company name that matched the search request. See the developer hub documentation which will accompany the release.
Additional match information. Search results now contain the following new result matches information, in addition to title:

items[].matches.snippet: Match highlight parameters for the snippet summary.
address_snippet and items[].matches.address_snippet: The postal address associated with the search result, and its match highlight parameters. The address is still returned as an items[].address object, but address_snippet will supplement this as a single, highlightable search result field.

See the developer hub documentation for further details: https://developer.companieshouse.gov.uk/api/docs/search-overview/search-overview.html

csmith · July 25, 2016, 4:37pm

csmith · August 2, 2016, 4:43pm

The search indexing has been completely redesigned to ensure that the most appropriate results are returned first. As part of this it was necessary to build in some intelligent algorithms, so that you don’t have to be quite so specific, accurate, or get the left-to-right’ness correct to find the company or officer you are looking for. Previously, searching was causing a lot of customer difficulty, and needed addressing.

The upshot is that we unavoidably get more matches, but the likelihood that the customer finds what they were looking for within the first few results is high, even with imprecise search terms. The more search terms you supply, the higher the chance of finding the result (a single word term is usually unhelpfully noisy…) and as you descend the result list, they will of course become increasingly less relevant, but still useful if you deliberately used a rather general search term.

The result ordering is now relatively predictable, whereas previously it looked a bit of a jumble. It is complicated to describe, but in general the results attempt to group themselves by relevance, and then alphabetically within that group. In all, the ordering “looks” right to users, and they no longer question the ordering. Consistency is always good!

There are also nearly three times the number of companies indexed, as we have included the last six years of dissolved companies. This will also increase the number of matches you receive, but unless you are pretty closely matching the dissolved company name, it will be ranked less important than an active company, as a decay function of it’s dissolution date.