The State of Site Search in Higher Education Research Report with The Chronicle of Higher Education | Download the Report
Schedule A Demo
The State of Site Search in Higher Education Research Report with The Chronicle of Higher Education | Download the Report
Menu Bar
Close
CASE STUDY

TH_NK Relies on SearchStax Managed Search
To Power Search and Personalization

Our insurance industry client required a search solution with high availability to meet their business needs. SearchStax had the expertise and experience in delivering disaster recovery in different cloud regions that satisfied our client's rigorous business requirements.

Project Manager | TH_NK

About

TH_NK is an independent digital transformation agency based in London, Liverpool and Newcastle. They work with clients like Vue, Adecco Group, Shop Direct, LV= and Liverpool Football Club to set and realize their digital ambitions.

The agency uniquely blends the skills and talent from the three kinds of partner clients typically need today. They combine the business focus of consultancies, the customer centricity of agencies and the tech capability of systems integrators – making it a true partner for change. TH_NK is also one of the few Sitecore Platinum Partners in the UK.

Need

TH_NK’s client, a leading UK insurance brand, needed a search solution to power search and personalization of their Sitecore implementation. They needed to enable the following use cases both from a search and personalization perspective:

  • New prospects looking for insurance, life, retirement and pension products
  • Existing customers wanting to find information about the products they have purchased
  • Industry press looking for information about the business.

Situation

Search is being used to index all content across the site to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for, including: FAQs, articles, guides, production information, glossary, contact numbers, and more.

The solution needed to be hosted on a high availability cluster in the Microsoft Azure Cloud with Disaster Recovery (DR). This separate DR deployment must be deployed in another region and remain in sync with the production deployment. This requires substantial in-depth knowledge of both search and Azure operations.

TH_NK initially considered Azure Search as an option. However, it did not support some of the key use cases that were required for the solution being developed. In addition, Azure Search could not meet their needs for high-availability, low latency, and relevance.

They instead decided to use to Apache Solr for their Sitecore implementation. Solr has been supported by Sitecore for many years and has become their de facto standard. Solr is now recommended by Sitecore as the best searching and indexing component for Sitecore solutions. Apache Solr is not one of TH_NK’s core offerings, so their preference was to partner with experts in this field. TH_NK realized they needed a Solr-as-a-Service solution for their searching and personalization component for this premium customer.

Solution

TH_NK looked at a number of hosted Solr-as-a-Service offerings and quickly decided on SearchStax Managed Search for the following reasons:

  1. SearchStax delivers Solr service as a high availability cluster and satisfies all of the functional requirements of the Sitecore based solution.
  2. It satisfies the non-functional requirements of the project specifically managed support, performance, and availability.
  3. They have experience in delivering disaster recovery solutions in different regions e.g. production in UK and DR in another region like West Europe.
  4. TH_NK has previously used SearchStax on a number of other projects for other clients and have always had excellent experiences.

Product

Managed Search

Platform

Sitecore

Location

EMEA

Industry

Financial Services

The Search Experience Company
G2 Enterprise Search Reviews for SearchStax

Products

Pricing

Resources

Services

Resources

Pricing

Company

Schedule A Demo
© 2025 SearchStax, Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
en_USEnglish
fr_CAFrançais du Canada en_USEnglish