Hinrichs founded Terra Productions in 2000, a company that provides hair and make-up artists, wardrobe, props and set designers for photo shoots. When she was diagnosed with RA two years later, she faced the possibility it could be debilitating in a line of work where Hinrichs depends on her fingers.
She decided to seek alternative treatments for the disease. “I’m into natural health and healing,” she says. “I went to a natural herbal healer, who immediately switched my diet. I eat gluten-free food. I don’t eat a lot of sugar or caffeine. I eat lots of ginger and stay away from acidic foods. I don’t drink pop, just water. And I exercise and make sure I get rest.”

BOSTON, Mass. (Dec. 1, 2004) – In a focused effort to maximize the value of web content, CrownPeak (www.crownpeak.com), the software service leader in content management, today unveiled CrownPeak Search, the first on-demand web site search system to automatically learn from both the behavior and content on customer’s web sites and automatically deliver the most relevant search results.  Two years in development, CrownPeak Search monitors every search request and every user interaction to learn and improve over time, adapting future searches to ensure lightning-fast, highly relevant results. It is the first on-demand search tool built specifically to add value to web content, helping organizations dramatically enhance the site search experience for site visitors.

CrownPeak announced the new product – only the second in the company’s four-year history – at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies, here though Dec. 2.
Like the company’s market-leading CrownPeak CMS content management solution, CrownPeak Search is offered as “software-as-a-service,” so there is no hardware to buy, no packaged software to install, and no changes needed to existing environments. Upfront costs have been minimized in favor of economical monthly maintenance fees, virtually eliminating risk.

Against industry norms that place deployments at weeks or even months, CrownPeak Search can be live in 48 hours or less, and customers can add or disable the search capability on-demand.  Early customers include Crain Publishing and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
 
Because CrownPeak Search is delivered as a software service, CrownPeak is there to work with the customer on fine-tuning search results.  Customers no longer have to dedicate a member of their staff to monitor and tune their search engine.  CrownPeak customers get a dedicated Account Manager who works with the customer every quarter to perform a “tune-up” on the search system.  This “tune-up” process is included in CrownPeak’s standard monthly software fees.    

 “We have created the most reliable and flexible hosted site search system on the
market,” said Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak.  “CrownPeak Search is extremely feature-rich, highly scalable, very rapid and reliable, and provides great capabilities for developers.  Matching that powerful system with our proven service offering is the true breakthrough.  We are the first company to combine machine-learning techniques with human intelligence, all wrapped up in a turnkey service.  That makes our offering truly unique.  

“Every quarter, we do a full system review and then offer our customer a set of recommendations for tuning the system.  Based on our customer’s guidance, we then tune the system to optimize relevance and reliability – and it’s all included in our standard monthly fees.  It’s the best of both worlds – world-class technology delivered as a fully managed service. 

CrownPeak Search customers have as much control over their own content as they choose, while machine learning capabilities minimize administrative demands by automatically making necessary adjustments based on semantic analysis and various learning techniques.  CrownPeak Search automatically begins to re-prioritize results based on how new the content is, what search queries are performed, how popular the content is, and what types of content visitors select from results.

Additionally, progressive matching technology puts an end to the frustrating "no results found" message, by adjusting for misspellings and interpreting the intent behind the actual search phrase used, the returns are organized by exact match, partial match, synonyms, misspellings, related concepts, and so on. 

“Whether it’s quickly guiding users to the products they want to buy, correctly answering questions about products they just purchased, or giving users an easy way to see clusters of conceptually related ideas, CrownPeak Search will serve as the primary tool for giving site visitors a qualitatively better site search experience,” said Howard.  “Many of those who already have site search are seeking a better way to deliver content to users of their web sites.  Those who have yet to deploy site search are seeking an economical, easy and high-quality way to deliver improved content to site visitors. CrownPeak Search is the next step in that evolution for both kinds of customers, and a new step for our company as well.”

Among CrownPeak Search’s standard features: promotion, ad insertion, embedded searches, directory creation, clustering and auto-indexing, advanced reporting and more.  CrownPeak Search is infinitely scalable. As a fully memory-resident application, indexes and searches execute across the CrownPeak server farms, and indexes live on multiple machines.  CrownPeak’s proven infrastructure, hosted at IBM’s world-class facilities enable CrownPeak to provide a market-leading Service Level Agreement, guaranteeing uptimes, response times, redundancy measures, and disaster recovery procedures.

At a glance, CrownPeak Search features include: