Find The Needle
A B2B directory is only useful if search actually works.
Thousands of suppliers across countless categories. The whole platform lives or dies on whether people can find what they're looking for - and that means handling the messy reality of how people actually search.
Search Is a Harder Problem Than It Looks
People don't search the way you'd expect. They use vague terms, industry jargon, abbreviations, and sometimes just describe what they need in plain English. A simple keyword match doesn't cut it when a buyer searching for "metal finishing" also needs to find suppliers listed under "electroplating" or "powder coating."
I built the search infrastructure and supplier management platform. Full-text search with relevance ranking that understands relationships between terms. Category navigation for when people want to browse rather than search. Supplier profile management so businesses can keep their listings current. Enquiry and lead tracking so suppliers know where their leads are coming from.
The admin tools make a directory of this size manageable - content moderation, featured listings, analytics on search patterns to identify gaps in the directory. The search handles all the complexity behind the scenes so users just type what they need and get results that make sense. That's the whole point of the platform, and if it doesn't work, nothing else matters.
