Our last announcement of a new site for the EIN in 2002 marked 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 has been matched by a tripling of the registered users who rely on the EIN for their work - immigration law practitioners, researchers, journalists, judges, academics and policy makers.

The key priorities for the rebuild included:

  • A powerful search engine which is scalable  and compliant with current full-text indexing and querying techniques.

  • A clear search interface which strikes a balance between maximising support for different search strategies and minimising the display of confusing options.

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

  • Improved dynamic cross referencing of content using the underlying search technology