Making Search Work Under Constraint

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

• 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.