Earlier this week, I bragged about what makes Global Search awesome.  And, yesterday, I shared why we built Global Search.  Today, one final post on how we built Global Search.  Comments or questions about Global Search?  Email me at josh+gs@panjiva.com.

How Did We Build Global Search?

In truth, I’m the wrong person to be answering this question, because I didn’t build Global Search.  Panjiva’s engineers did.

Global Search is awesome because Panjiva’s engineers are awesome.  They’re not the bragging type, but I am.  Jim Psota, Panjiva’s co-founder and CTO, has put together an extraordinary team of engineers and articulates the over-arching product vision for Panjiva, at the heart of which you’ll find Global Search.  Tim Garnett, Panjiva’s Lead Engineer and Technical Director, is the driving force behind Global Search, and Kevin Qi and Jeff Cohen round out the core Global Search team.

These guys were able to bring Global Search to life because they’re awesome — and because they had the support of so many others.  The rest of the Panjiva engineering team pitched in, of course, as did product manager Carolyn Flood and the Global Search Launch Team, which consisted of talented folks from across the Panjiva organization.

But the real heroes of Global Search are our clients, who have been teaching us for years about what they need to do their jobs.  To our clients who patiently described their problems and their processes, and to the clients who gave us feedback on our earliest ideas for, and versions of, Global Search — thank you.

Ok, you’ve made it through the tech equivalent of an Academy Awards acceptance speech, and you still don’t know how we actually built Global Search.  Well, basically, we developed technology that allowed us to do in an automated way what our clients were doing in a manual way: crawling the web in search of information and then piecing it together in a way that facilitated decision-making.

We started with the companies in our database and scoured the web for publicly available information about these companies — much as general search engines do.  We paid attention to where we found this information and then looked around, on these websites, for more information about more companies involved in global trade.  When all was said and done, we found relevant information about over 6 million companies on over 7 million web pages spread across nearly 500,000 unique domains.

The next step was to give our clients an easy way to access all this information.  The Global Search interface was designed to accomplish three things:

• First, Global Search takes full advantage of all of the new data we’ve found to deliver better search results than ever before.  Our clients prefer to see companies that have matching products and that can easily be contacted.  Global Search gives priority to companies that have these characteristics and provides us with a flexible framework for incorporating even more relevant data in the years ahead.

• Second, Global Search delivers results, based on an obscene amount of data, really fast.  I can’t tell you how Tim and team made it so fast, and, frankly, I hope they won’t tell you either.  Hey, we need to have some secrets.

• Third, Global Search points you to the places around the web where all of this data originates, so you can know the source of information when determining how to use that information — and so you can easily hunt for more information.  Just as Kayak sends you out to individual airline sites, we’re excited to send you to all the places on the web where you can find more information about companies engaged in global trade.

So that’s what we’ve been up to.  It’s taken a year to get Global Search into the hands of our clients, and of course this year of work built on several years spent learning about the problems our clients faced and about how they used earlier incarnations of Panjiva.

As you can tell — after three blog posts! — we’re really proud of what we’ve built.  But, frankly, there’s so much more work to be done, so now it’s time to get back to doing it.