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Making Search Work Under Constraint

  • Writer: Vandana Munjal
    Vandana Munjal
  • Mar 20, 2024
  • 1 min read

Updated: Jul 2

Our total rewards & benefits portal held plenty of content, but no way to search it. Also, one of the most asked request from users. The obvious fix sounded expensive: “new platform, new budget, come back next quarter.” But, employees were stuck every day.


So I stopped sketching new buildings and looked for a smaller door.


Two Ways In

  1. Hand-roll a JavaScript search: quick to code, weak on ranking.

  2. Borrow a mature engine: let an external crawler do the heavy lifting.


The second path proved lighter. API's like Google Programmable Search & Bing Custom Search were cost-free, quick to wire in, and used our existing content, but only if it earned its place.


Trial by Sandbox

Bing Custom Search Interface
Bing Custom Search Interface
  • Safe space first: I collaborated with IT to build a sandbox so we could break things safely.

  • Real-query checks: searches like “tuition assistance” and “401(k)” surfaced the right page on the first try.

  • Usability metric: average findabiliy time dropped significantly


The bar cleared: low effort, zero spend, immediate lift.

We shipped the search bar that week.




Why It Worked Here

Public-facing pages were already indexed, so results appeared the moment search went live, no auth, no crawl lag.


If Your Content Sits Behind a Lock

Tools like Algolia, Elasticsearch, or Azure Cognitive Search can index private data securely behind SSO or API keys and still spare you a rebuild.

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