# Citizen service starts on the homepage Press release of 21 February 2024: how cities and municipalities use on-site search, OCR and multisite search to make information and forms easier to find. *Vienna, 21 February 2024* How innovative technologies simplify access to public information on the web **(Vienna, 21 February 2024)** Municipalities and cities are confronted with an overwhelming amount of data every day. At the same time, they have to fulfil their mandate to offer the highest service quality in the digital space as well. A wealth of relevant information such as municipal news, ordinances and legal texts must be prepared in an easily understandable way, organised and maintained. So while digitalisation efforts keep advancing, local administrations also need to meet citizens halfway with user-friendliness on their websites. Whether the information and forms people are looking for can be found efficiently with the website’s search function directly influences service quality in the eyes of citizens. Providing data in a user-friendly way is therefore one of the most important steps of digitalisation in the public sector. This article aims to show how an on-site search can best be implemented on municipal websites and what benefits it brings – to citizens as well as to the administration. ## Digitalisation as an opportunity for better service quality Digitalisation offers an excellent opportunity to simplify access to public services. The best example of this is the success of the “Digitales Amt” app. More than one million Austrians already use the application to handle official procedures conveniently from their smartphone. “Signing official documents or submitting applications while you sit in a café, without ever having to visit an office in person – that is a big step towards a more efficient and citizen-friendly administration,” says Christoph Wendl, CEO of Iphos IT Solutions GmbH. The Viennese company developed the internal company search engine and on-site search searchit and has been working intensively on the requirements of the public sector for some time. Since the coronavirus year 2020, Iphos IT Solutions has been leading the initiative “Österreich sucht! Digitalisation offensive for government organisations”. ## On-site search – searching all the information and forms on a website When websites are put into operation, the importance of search is often not considered – yet beyond a certain complexity and size of a website, the search functions built in by default reach their limits. One reason: files are only searched by their titles, but not by their content and metadata. A serious disadvantage when official forms, legal texts and ordinances are named with abbreviations that mean nothing to laypeople. So it does happen that citizens rack their brains over an outdated version of a form while the link to the current form is hidden on some subpage. A key element of modern websites, especially for cities and municipalities, is an intuitive search function directly on the site. This so-called on-site search allows users to find the information they want quickly without having to navigate through countless menus. “Imagine you could find everything from opening hours and events to specific details of laws with a single click – that is on-site search,” explains Wendl. The further development of public administration in the digital space serves above all to achieve better services for citizens. “Access to all the information needed, from municipal housing, healthcare and taxes to cultural events, should be easy and quick for everyone,” Wendl continues. “Our enterprise search software searchit, with its convenient on-site search, is intended to contribute to such a citizen-oriented service.” ## Searching image-based documents such as scans and pictures with one click “Municipalities have to manage many different media: from images and databases to newspaper articles and forms. To offer the most efficient search possible, searchit can search virtually any file format, even scanned documents and images,” explains Wendl. In addition, another innovative tool can be integrated into the public sector’s digital toolbox: OCR technology, short for ‘optical character recognition’. This technology turns scanned documents and photos into searchable and readable text. “Even if you only have a document as a photo, our system can recognise the text in the image and make it searchable. This makes searching for specific information across a large number of documents considerably easier.” ## Multisite search – cross-site search for all municipal services Federal government, states and municipalities – in most countries the public sector operates on many levels – and this is reflected in the digital space. It is not always clear to citizens which institution and department they can turn to with their concerns. In the worst case, a call ends up in a chain of phone transfers that leads to a dead end after several forwardings. “Many municipalities run a large number of websites – from social institutions to tourism associations,” says Wendl. “Ideally, a multisite search is used here: a kind of super search function that makes it possible to access information from various connected websites at the same time. A citizen could then view both local ordinances and national laws with just one query.” To create such a link between information from authorities at state and local level, Iphos IT Solutions implemented a searchit multisite search three years ago for the Bavarian State Office for Broadband and Surveying (Landesamt für Breitband und Vermessung, LDBV). The LDBV looks after more than 400 official Bavarian websites with information such as legal texts. With searchit, citizens can, for example, also find relevant information from the main site of the Bavarian tax office on these websites of every local tax office – and vice versa. Every month, around a quarter of a million search queries are carried out with searchit on the sites of the Bavarian authorities, and hundreds of thousands of files in a wide variety of formats are searched using full-text search. ## Inclusiveness through accessible display of results Municipalities and cities have a special responsibility to make their information accessible to everyone. Wendl explains how searchit meets this requirement, which is decisive in the public sector: “An important aspect of our work is ensuring that information is accessible to everyone without barriers, regardless of physical impairments. We rely on ‘ReadSpeaker’ for this. This software makes texts accessible through speech output. This means that people with visual impairments can also access information easily – simply by having the content read aloud to them.” ## Administration in the digital space instead of in the waiting room If questions can be answered without a call or a visit to the office being necessary, more resources are freed up for civil servants and employees. At a time of skills shortages in the public sector, this means less processing effort for staff and better service quality for citizens – a win-win situation. Phone queues and waiting rooms are relieved as well, and processes can run faster and more transparently. “We know how much organisational effort content management on public-sector websites involves,” says Wendl from experience. “By using an effective search, problems can be solved before they arise. From the focus of our projects, we are also aware of the public sector’s particular demands on internet security and eliminate potential security gaps right from the start,” Wendl promises in conclusion. More about on-site search with searchit: [www.searchit-enterprise-search.com/plugin-suche-fuer-website-intranet/](https://www.searchit-enterprise-search.com/plugin-suche-fuer-website-intranet/) ## About searchit The international company Iphos IT Solutions is redefining “enterprise search engines” for businesses. With the launch of searchit, the company is positioning itself as a sustainable innovator in the industry. Ing. Christoph Wendl, together with Lyubomir Ivanov, runs the company, founded in 1998, as Chief Executive Officer (CEO); it meets the current challenges of IT with innovative solutions. ## Media contact - Ing. Christoph Wendl, Managing Director of Iphos IT Solutions GmbH - Khekgasse 35, 1230 Vienna, Austria - Phone: +43 1 869 84 00 - Email: [info@searchit.cc](mailto:info@searchit.cc) - [Release as PDF (German)](https://searchit-agent.ai/pr/buergerservice-beginnt-auf-der-homepage/20240220-presseaussendung-oeffentlichersektorservicequalitaet.pdf) --- - searchit AI Agent: This version is generated from the page's language files (scripts/gen-unternehmen.py). The page itself is authoritative.