Powering faster, relevant, and intelligent discovery through Sitecore Search
The background
The site run by AEMO contains one of the most technically complicated content setups, comprising market rules and procedures, the Integrated System Plan, the Quarterly Energy Dynamics reports, gas and electricity market data, consultations, and guidance for hundreds of registered market participants. Given the volume and requirements of this content, the search must be fast, accurate, and able to keep up.
The search feature AEMO had previously used was developed over time to meet changing requirements. Although it had fulfilled its role, the implementation had become fragile and difficult to maintain, and the inconsistent taxonomy and indexing made it harder for users to reliably find the market and regulatory content they needed when they needed it.
The challenge
Since discoverability is essential for an organisation situated at the heart of Australia’s energy transition, it is not just a desirable feature but a mission-critical one. Market participants, policymakers, and the public depend on AEMO’s website to easily and confidently find accurate, up-to-date information, such as technical specifications and major publications.
AEMO needed a search solution that could:
- Move away from a fragile, heavily customised legacy Solr implementation onto a more robust, supportable architecture
- Work seamlessly with the Sitecore 10.4 platform and the Dataweavers hosting infrastructure
- Improve content taxonomy and indexing to lift discoverability of critical market and regulatory content
- Provide a foundation aligned with AEMO’s broader digital strategy — one capable of supporting AI-powered search and intelligent content discovery as those capabilities matured
The solution
NOW Digital incorporated SitecoreAI Search into the system, seamlessly integrating it with the Sitecore environment and the Dataweavers infrastructure used by AEMO, to replace the existing setup with a more modern, cloud-native search architecture.
Speed and scale, built in
Since Sitecore Search is a cloud-native SaaS solution, it is designed to deliver fast, low-latency results at scale without requiring the infrastructure management of a self-managed search engine. This has allowed AEMO to replace an implementation that required continuous custom maintenance and switch to one built from the outset for performance and reliability, enabling their internal teams to concentrate on content and strategy rather than maintaining the infrastructure.
Sharper accuracy through field-based indexing
We created an indexing system tailored to AEMO’s content types and market terminology, with a particular focus on the most important fields rather than merely matching on surface-level keywords. Because of our ability to perform synonym and keyword matching, users who search in the language of the energy sector are always directed to the right technical content, even when their query does not exactly match the original terminology.
Relevance tuned to AEMO’s audience
The search features have been carefully designed to meet AEMO’s requirements, with improvements to how results are ranked and presented. This is not the standard search option available generically, but instead a relevance setting developed in accordance with how market participants, regulators, and the public search for and use AEMO’s content, so that the most relevant and up-to-date information is always shown at the top.
A foundation for intelligent search
The new architecture is designed with future requirements in mind. The cloud-native, architecture-first foundation of Sitecore is designed to support an increasing range of intelligent features in the future, such as natural language understanding, AI-driven relevance ranking, and personalised content discovery. As a result, AEMO will have a platform that aligns with its digital strategy and that serves as the foundation for AI-powered search and intelligent content discovery.
The conclusion – a smarter foundation for Australia’s energy market
AEMO achieved a search experience that was quicker, more accurate and considerably easier to maintain by moving to Sitecore Search, thereby replacing an unstable and heavily customised previous system with one that is scalable and future-proof. The improved taxonomy and indexing, which are based on fields, have enhanced the discoverability of AEMO’s key market and regulatory content, and careful tuning of relevance ensures that users obtain what they need more quickly.
The fact that an organisation at the centre of one of the country’s most significant infrastructure transitions achieves such a combination of speed, accuracy and intelligence means this is a solution that provides a platform upon which Australia’s energy market can remain informed both at the present time and as AEMO’s digital strategy moves forward.