Hello, everyone, and welcome to the session Building Location Aware Search. Designing location apps to help visitors find you and your products and services is a core part of a functional web presence. As the world opens up again post pandemic, of course, at different speeds and with different constraints, you could say that location matters again. Whether you're a retailer with brick and mortar storefronts, perhaps a health care provider seeking to make it easier to locate a physician or a health service, finder apps are critical, and our customers are asking about them. In this session, you'll learn how to elevate your website experience with Coveo search and recommendations by designing location apps to help visitors find you and your products and use geospatial data to personalize site search results based on location. Before we jump in, though, if you're listening live, we strongly encourage you to share feedback, ask questions throughout the session. Please note there is a chat for the entire event and for this particular session. So use the chat tab for session to make sure your comments and questions related to the session are visible and they get answered. So with that, let me turn it over to Ali, our product manager for website solutions at Coveo, to walk through how to make location aware search come to life. Ali, it's all you. Thank you. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Ali. I'm a product manager for the Coveo for websites, line at Caveo. So, we are responsible for making sure that the experiences that we provide in our websites line of business are, great on the same level for all of our customers no matter what they're using, for their website. So we have full integrations for things like, Sitecore. Now we are also releasing an AEM connector and going deeper into that, but we also support a variety of different integrations. So and kind of generic integrations into different websites. And apologies if you went to to the session earlier, which I was presenting because I I tend to repeat myself on some of the fundamentals of great search. And one thing that, I often repeat is that people take great experiences for granted. They take them for granted until they are not good enough. So you only realize when something is off, but when something is great, when you're used to having the kind of experiences that Amazon provides for ecommerce, for example, for YouTube, being able to have those query suggestions, content discovery, all those kind of experiences really set the bar for what you need. So when you have AI powered search and you invest in search, that's the level that we're striving for. We're striving to have people get that same kind of great experience because they will notice, if you don't have it. And for search in general, so people think that, you know, it's limited to one use case, often, but that's really, really, really far from the truth. There are so many different applications for a site search, not all of which I'm gonna go through here today, but, essentially, when you think about going on a website that you're visiting. And one of the first things that I try to avoid doing is navigating through a content tree. So going up in the menu somewhere and looking to find content manually instead of having search drive core navigation, allowing me to find the products that I want without knowing the hierarchy of the website, how categories are, done for products, things like that. And then once you actually, do get on the search page, well, you have the opportunity to, merchandise your products. So have search drive the whole experience when it comes to delivering the products in front of your customers. In the case of Ansys here who recently launched, running on AEM, They have this great little feature, for a facet for free trials. So you can narrow down the software which you're immediately able to try. So they highlight that nicely in the result template. Super great feature, super dynamic. You can obviously also, offer merchandising for services. So being able in the case of Fastned in the screenshot here, to have people search. And people search is its own thing. It's a really, really useful feature. And let me tell you, when there is a lawyer who is unable to find themselves on their own website, IT is usually in trouble. They they need to fix that really, really quickly. So, Fasten has an amazing experience for people search combined with a variety of other parts in their search, including dynamic pages. So when you actually visit the People Search, you're gonna get content that's populated by Coveo, directly on the page. So these are three interesting applications. But when it comes to, some more of the cool stuff that you can do, with Coveo is map search or location search in general. So being able to do a few things like personalized, content based on location. So not necessarily directly a map search, but also find services in locations, whether it's stores or pharmacies, whatever you're looking to do. And being able to do that while also retaining all the power of a platform such as ours, where you have the ability to influence results in any number of ways, personalize them, affect the ranking, do all of that same management. Once you have your map search set up, you pretty much have everything you need. But this is one of the cool applications that that we have. And I'm just gonna walk you through, what it looks like on on, I guess, a bit more technical level here, what's required to make this work and showcase a few of the examples that we have for map search today. So the how to guide. Fundamentally, we have, three aspects really that are needed here. Maybe a fourth one being the actual interface itself. But essentially, what you're looking to have is geolocation data on your items. So when you're, no matter how you're indexing the stores or content that you wanna find on a map, you can simply add fields for latitude and longitude, have those on the items as a prerequisite. So that's a pretty simple step to handle. The other ones are relatively simple too because we make it easy for you with a set of different components that are, built into our JavaScript search framework. The first one being the distance resource component. So this one here is going to handle the actual calculation of distance, based on the location data. But the location data that we get from the user needs to be provided from some place as well. So we have a variety of different position providers, that make that happen. I'm gonna walk through that quickly. I'm gonna do a quick screen share here. Let me guide you here through, what I'm what I'm, talking about. I'm gonna go through these pages. They're a bit dry. They're, a bit more on the technical side, but it's important to understand what's really required and to kind of get an idea after the session in your mind of the work that you will need to do to implement it. Whether you're a Coveo customer yet or not, and you're interested in this, it's important to understand the concept. So coming back to the distance resource component, really, we're just talking here about, being able to automatically calculate the distance from the person to the location that we have in the index, and this component here is going to handle that for us. Now, afterwards, we need to have a way of feeding the actual location data from the user into the this component. For that, we have three possibilities. We have what we call the static position provider, which is basically just a way of manually feeding a position into the the distance resource component. So if, for example, you wanna have a drop down with specific cities, and you wanna kind of provide, simulate where the user is, so if they wanna search from a certain position, you could do it with this. So just manually kind of, providing that into the component. We have our navigator position provider, which uses the built in capabilities of the web browser to do, the the location, working in HTTPS only. So if for some reason, you don't have a certificate and secure, a secure website, please, get a certificate. It's easy these days. But other than that, it really just takes care of that for you. And lastly, we have the Google API position provider, which is going to use the Google Maps geolocation API. So this is, the most fancy option here, the most, thorough one. Can use to get a API key from, from Google, to use that, so there's, quotas on what you can use. But it's definitely one of the more powerful ones. But when you combine these things, you have the possibility of, with your item having the the search in, having the the latitude and longitude information, feeding into a distance resource component. And then you can also do things like hooking on to specific events that are triggered. So on position, resolve, for example, here is going to, trigger a certain action. You could have something like a pop up that when a position is is triggered. So if you find, a location, you could do any kind of, custom, code that runs on these events. So there's really a a large amount of personalization possible. One of our core examples here is MetroHealth, We're using us for general search on their site, but also for two cool features, which are the find a doctor and location, search as well, so full location search. In this case, we're not actually using a dynamic provider, so this is not, map search in reality, but it does provide the possibility of, narrowing down by where you are. Often also, you wanna be treated by a specific agenda for the doctor. That's perfectly understandable, and it provides all the kind of information that you need. So here, if I want something in anesthesiology anesthesiology, sorry, I'm able to find, any kind of doctor. I can switch over and easily find what I need. But they also have locations, and this is where, the distance resources come in. So providing a way for your users to be able to explore locations on a map, get everything that they need. So additional information, getting directions directly from here, being able to do things like display distance. Definitely, I'm far from here. I think this is Detroit, and we are in Quebec City. So, we're clearly able to calculate this because I have enabled my location capabilities. It's a really convenient way of finding something that is of extreme importance to your customers, and finding it in a way that is immediately referenceable as well. Because if we only had the boxes at the bottom, yes, you can take that address, maybe put it into Google Maps, but visually, you can explore based on where you are, the the need that you have, and what will serve you best in the short term. One of the other types of searches like this that I like is on the Humana side. So finding a pharmacy here, I always use the example of nine zero two one o because that's the most memorable ZIP code from the TV show for me. But, what I like is that, of course, they have the the dynamic, aspect of going through the map. You're able to refresh your search. So in this case, they're not triggering it automatically. They allow the user to trigger it, which sometimes can be more efficient if you're looking around and you don't want something to to move necessarily as you're moving around. What what I found interesting is that they're doing things like offering the language that is spoken at a pharmacy. Now I was born in former Yugoslavia, now, Bosnia, but I grew up in Germany. So if I if I'm looking here for a German speaking pharmacy, I can find that, pretty quickly, through this interface. So I'll be able to get, these three pharmacies. I get also a list of the services offered, and I can decide to narrow down further by that, pretty much everything here. And I can also do things like select the network of the provider that I'm with. Everything is enabled, by this kind of map search here. So now I'm getting locations. Perhaps I live here at the in the heart of Los Angeles, and I want the fastest German speaking pharmacy that I can get to, and I can find it with this here. So that's really, really interesting as a use case. One last one here is going to be the location search, so from Colliers to find different properties, that are for sale. Now if, I'm navigating here through the site, I can, of course, narrow down. And these guys, they're gonna be doing, more of the the direct search. So, moving around is going to trigger a search directly. But I also have the ability to do auto completion. So if I search for my region here, I get these great, category based query suggestions, that allow me to really narrow down quickly. Because here I see Greater Montreal. I can skip down right to my Quebec region and to Quebec City where I'm located. Let's see what's for sale. Now I'm not in need of a warehouse, but, now that I see it here, I may be interested in owning one. I'm not sure what I could do with it, but it's definitely, something that was easy to find here. I can explore further on from there, get all of the important information. And further than that, I can decide to track by default, we're gonna track things like where the the what the user clicked. All of that analytics data that's provided is going to be available to us. Then we can do interesting things. So we could decide to apply, different ranking functions. So we have a way of influencing the order of results. For example, if I wanna do things like, decide that the further away I get from a certain radius, the the less these results matter. So that, that location based search is is not only based on distance here, but can apply a custom formula to that. So we can override the simple one to one relation, and have something that's more dynamic. So that within a certain range, it's going to do a curve of relevancy here that we could tweak. So, using our query, ranking formulas that are applied either on the platform directly or in the front end, there's really a lot of possibilities here. One thing that we also have the ability to do in more custom implementations is building a a set of capabilities that more, accurately represent how users think about, search in in a map search. So doing things like being able to not only provide the results that the user is actually searching for in the keywords, but doing things like highlighting results which they may be interested in, which don't match the the the actual result set, but that could be derived from what we know about other users of their type who visited. So we could highlight in green here on the map, the ability something like, the the exact results, and then do in a in a more, nuanced way, so kind of a transparent, for example, additional locations. And for that, we actually have a great, example on a blog post which you can find. You just have to search for Coveo map by, Vincent Bernard and David, from our team here, who Vincent, who is our lead solution architect, showcasing some of the the more interesting things here that we don't have the time to go, into all of them today, but doing exactly here what was mentioned. So, having the possibility, for example, of showcasing data in this way where we're highlighting these results, automatically for the results that we know that the user will want, and then also showcasing some additional different locations for things that may be of interest to them. For example, in the case of a property search here, if we define a certain range of prices, for example, if you implement a price range for that, in this case, prices are not necessarily available directly, then you could do something like offer, suggestions outside of that possibility, outside of the range that's mentioned. Or if there's a certain range for the distance, the maximum distance that you want, you could still kind of highlight the fact that, at the edge of that range, there are other considerations for the end user. There's really a a lot that, can be done at the end of the day with, this kind of implementation. So I think I speak a bit too quickly. I was afraid here of running out of time. But, essentially, a there is a really a convenient way for you for you to build a map search that's functional very quickly, that can be customized, and then you can start experimenting with different ideas on how you wanna implement the additional, personalization and customization that you can bring to your end users for that this kind of experience. Alright. Ali Ali, I think this is a great quick intro. I mean, I learned many things. Among them, your favorite throwback TV show is obviously got a two one o. The fact that you're not in the market for a the episode actually, but yeah. I don't know. You're in the you're not in the market for a warehouse and, the key concepts behind location search itself. There is a question, from the live audience as well. It's around user approval. So specifically asking, does it require users approval to allow a site to use location data? So I think looking, at explicit approvals versus a a user entering that data directly into, into the application itself. So maybe you could comment on that. Absolutely. So you have the, the browser normally taking care of that, that aspect. So requiring, the the website to ask for permission to get the the location. And you can definitely also disable that fully if you really wanted to. So you don't need to request the location. You could simply let the user indicate where where they are. It's definitely convenient to land on a page and to be able to automatically, get positioned in search. So that's that's something that can be handled. But apart from that, in terms of privacy, it's going to be respected and also enforced by the browser directly. That's great. Just looking, at the chat as well to see if there's any other questions, related to that topic. I know, there's some questions just around the specific examples. So I think we're our moderator is sharing the direct links to some of the examples that you shared as well. And and maybe just commenting, obviously, you looked specifically at finder applications here, in the health care space. There's the obvious examples too in the retail space with the retail storefronts. If you look at using geolocation data as a signal for personalization, maybe talk a little bit about, this is obviously scratching the surface around geolocation, but what other signals can you use to be able to to personalize, search results as a part of your site search implementation. So if you're have if you have your your, search results as part your sorry. Your location, for example, as part of your regular search and offer a map search as well, you're tracking analytics data that, brings along with it a bunch of different kinds of context. So if you have logged in users, obviously, you know a lot about them. So you can decide to grab, you know, the kind of persona that they are. If you have anonymous users, well, you have, obviously, their location, their previous queries that can be used directly to influence, the the results as well. And then you can decide to use what you know about them. So if you can identify a user, as a certain type or from a certain, speaking a certain language or doing, really any number of things. All of that can be used in map search to decide to apply a different ranking function here to influence the order of results. Machine learning is going to take care also, despite being map search, despite being kind of all over the place here. In reality, we're still talking about a list of results that you're gonna have and that, are individual items. So when these are visited, we're gonna know that the user, based on the context that we have about them, is interested in this type of product, location, store, service, whatever it is, all of the the great things that come with Coveo when it comes to machine learning are still going to be taken into account, here with the ability to personalize in more creative ways because you're kind of thinking three dimensionally instead of two dimensionally. So you have that aspect of, deciding, what the sphere of influence is and how are you gonna promote things that are perhaps tangential tangential tangential, sorry, related here to the the query at hand. So there's a there's a lot of things to to go through. It's also why it's, I think, difficult for map search to do, only a single use case. It's it's fun to explore because depending on what you're working with, as, items on your map, you have different, ideas that can can pop into your mind. So it's definitely a fun discussion to have, and to start brainstorming about the interesting opportunities simply that it offers to you. Ali, thanks for introducing the the concepts here. I think if if a customer if you're thinking about using location data, if you're thinking about going beyond the search box as a Coveo navigation discovery tool and looking for creative ways to be able to enhance the customer experience, I think this is this is great inspiration for that. So, Ali, thank you for that. I know to follow this session at two thirty five PM eastern time, There is a technology user group around development tools, so it's an opportunity to learn about the tools that can help make your development process faster and easier when using Coveo. So, if you're interested, come with questions, give feedback to our expert panelists. Please join us at that session. And again, Ali, thank you for sharing your insights. For everyone attending live, thank you for coming and learning a little bit more about location based data and how you can exploit that in your search implementations. And we will talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you.