Electronic Immigration Network

The last time we announced a new site for the EIN was back in 2002, and at that time it heralded the beginning of a completely new approach to web development at GreenNet. The research and development that went into the EIN's case-building 'bundlemaker' software, advanced searching tools, membership management systems and secure access had application for dozens of subsequent projects. Nearly 10 years later we've come full circle and used the learning from all those projects to completely rebuild the EIN.

Since 2002, the EIN database of 100,000 records  tripled in size to more than 300 000 documents. This hike in content was also reflected in a tripling of numbers of people who now rely on this resource in their day-to-day work - immigration practitioners, students, journalists, judges, academics and others.

The key priorities for the rebuild included:

• A search engine which is scalable, powerful and up to date with the recent research on full-text indexing a querying techniques.

• A search interface which provides a smooth user experience, which supports different user search strategies at the earliest possible level, without overwhelming with choices

• A  search relevancy ranking which is tunable to the type of content and results of the analysis of specific user search behavior

• Cross referencing which is aided by the underlying technology