Innovation: Faster than light search

This month, the engineers and product innovators at Studyportals have adopted Amazon Cloudsearch to reduce the waiting time spent by students when searching for that Masters’ Degree in Scenography. This is part of a larger ongoing project aimed at improving our overall search functionality on all the Studyportals platforms. The reason why we’re currently focusing on improving our search functionality and speed because we want to give students the best possible experience on our website, and make sure that university programmes load as quickly as possible.

By switching the search functionality to a cloud-based search service, we’ve dramatically increased the search speed on our portals: an average search now just takes between 200 and 300 ms. That means that if you take the recent improvements to the way search results are visually previewed into account, the perceived loading time is reduced to close to zero. This also significantly reduces the overall loading time of our portal pages every time students use the search functionality. We’re already seeing improvements in the bounce rate, likely resulting in students being even better informed when browsing programmes.