Building Rank-Based Focused Search with Modern Architecture
A leading Los Angeles-based music publishing company initiated a major, corporate-level strategic initiative to modernize its core intellectual property systems. As a core component of this large-scale effort, the creative marketing team struggled with an outdated, complex system for pitching assets. The system housed over 2 million high-value music assets, but the legacy search process was slow and cumbersome. Our engagement focused on delivering a high-speed, relevant, and simplified "Google-like" search experience by migrating data to Elasticsearch and providing integrated, reusable search components, making our team's delivery a pivotal part of the corporate strategy.
1. The Challenge: Slow Pitching, Complex Data
In 2015, the company's core asset management resided on a mainframe system. The user experience for the creative marketing team was highly inefficient:
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Lengthy Forms: Pitching required navigating a complex and time-consuming search form to filter assets.
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Information Overload: The 2 million assets each contained extensive metadata—including artist, mood, genre, and instrumentation—but the mainframe's retrieval mechanisms failed to leverage this richness effectively.
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Business Goal: The strategic initiative demanded a fundamental shift: a fast, intuitive search interface capable of presenting the most relevant assets at the top to simplify and accelerate the pitching process. The current system was tiring, complex, and time-intensive.
The senior technical architect needed a lean, highly technical team capable of rapid execution to deliver this core strategic component quickly.
2. >The Solution: Lean Team, Scalable Search Architecture
Our team was tasked with providing a complete, modern search solution package that would serve as a critical foundation for the client's broader corporate modernization strategy and integrate seamlessly into their target system.
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Data Migration & Daily Sync: The entire 2+ million asset catalog, including all complex metadata, was initially migrated from the mainframe system. We established a reliable daily synchronization process to ensure the highly performant search index remained up-to-date with the ever-changing asset data.
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Elasticsearch Implementation: We deployed and configured Elasticsearch, the industry-leading search and analytics engine, hosted within the client's AWS private cloud environment.
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Rank-Based Text Search: We developed sophisticated search logic to move beyond simple filtering. This included implementing rank-based text search capabilities that prioritized relevance, ensuring that the most suitable assets appeared immediately for the creative team.
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Reusable Components & APIs: We built a set of reusable search UI components and a dedicated Search API. This decoupled the search logic from the front-end application, making it easy for the client's development teams to integrate the fast search functionality across multiple systems in their suite.
This approach delivered a robust, scalable backend and a modular, integrated search layer.
3. Results and Impact
The new search architecture immediately transformed the music pitching workflow, delivering significant strategic value:
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Streamlined Process: The new, simplified search experience drastically reduced the time and complexity previously associated with the mainframe system.
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Enhanced Discovery: The rank-based relevance engine ensured that creative marketers could find the perfect asset for their pitches faster than ever before.
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Ecosystem Integration: The centralized Search API and reusable UI components were integrated into various target systems across the publishing suite, establishing a modern, consistent, and performant asset search foundation for the entire organization. Our delivery played a pivotal and non-negotiable role in achieving the broader corporate modernization goals.
4. Conclusion: From Mainframe Complexity to Accelerated Discovery
The successful migration of over two million assets from a legacy mainframe to a high-performance Elasticsearch environment on AWS achieved the core mandate of the corporate strategy. By providing a lean, expert team and deploying a scalable, relevance-driven search architecture, we fundamentally transformed the client's creative marketing efficiency. The solution delivered a fast, intuitive "Google-like" experience that positioned the client for future growth and allowed their team to accelerate high-value pitches.
This engagement exemplifies our capability to leverage modern web technologies and innovative thinking to deliver simple solutions that solve complex business challenges, drive down operational costs, and foster greater organizational efficiency.
Ready to modernize your complex search to high quality focused and simple search? Contact L&Q today..