TwigKit Delivers Better, Faster Search-Based Applications

LONDON, England—November 11, 2011—Search-based applications are being touted as a revolution in information-intensive, purpose-built business applications. Yet they can be time-consuming to build and often lack a refined user experience. TwigKit, a London-based startup, is positioning itself as the missing ingredient in search-based applications. The firm provides a software framework specifically designed to provide a first-class user experience for search-based applications, while simultaneously slashing the amount of development effort required.

“The modern corporation must make sense of exploding amounts of information spread across dozens of organizational silos,” said Stefan Olafsson, TwigKit’s co-founder and chief architect. “In the past, structured data such as product records have been stored in databases, while unstructured information such as documents and web pages have been handled by search engines. The result is that management has no unified view of the organization, only portholes into a patchwork of disconnected repositories. However, search-based applications are changing what’s possible within the enterprise.”

Search-based applications are purpose-built business applications backed by a search engine rather than a database. They enable companies to bring divergent silos of information together in one place, and to integrate both structured and unstructured information sources. Search-based applications are already being used by Fortune 50’s and startups alike to create next-generation solutions for everything from business intelligence and eDiscovery, to media monitoring and intelligence analysis, to pure enterprise search.

“Though praise for search-based applications abounds, they have yet to reach their full potential,” said Olafsson. “Since search-based applications are custom built, development effort can be steep and the user experience often falls short of expectations. What’s more, search-based applications are typically contingent on being able to consolidate information sources into a single search index, often not practical because of data governance and security concerns.”

“TwigKit is the missing link in search-based applications, standardizing communication with diverse data repositories, slashing development time, and delivering a superb user experience that fits within the enterprise,” declared Tyler Tate, TwigKit’s other co-founder and lead designer. “By abstracting access to search engines, data warehouses, web search engines, and custom APIs, TwigKit provides organizations with a modern, rapid development framework. And by distilling user research, refined interaction design, and cross-browser compatible markup and styling into configurable, extendable user interface components, TwigKit delivers a slick user experience regardless of the underlying platform. And crucially, TwigKit is built to slot into any enterprise architecture, run on any platform, and integrate seamlessly with security systems.”

TwigKit powers enterprise search applications in government and blue-chip organizations. Encapsulating search best practices into configurable components, TwigKit establishes a platform-independent standard compatible with most search technologies including Microsoft FAST, Google Search Appliance, and Apache Solr. Started in London in 2009, TwigKit’s founders organize the 350-member Enterprise Search London meetup, regularly speak at conferences, and write about search and user experience for publications including A List Apart, Boxes & Arrows, and UX Magazine.

Press Contact:

Tyler Tate
TwigKit
tyler@twigkit.com