Wine-Searcher's Technology

Our specialist wine search engine consists of four key software components:

• The website, built and hosted for us by Limitless. We run multiple Apache web servers attached to multiple Oracle database servers. These machines are based in the UK and provide the results for the many millions of searches we process each day. We also have a Mobile Site for portable devices.

• Spidering software (Wine-Searcherbot), which collects wine lists from our merchants' websites. We include price lists from 40,400 wine merchants, retailers and wineries, and (on average) all price lists are updated three or more times a week. Our spidering software runs on US-based servers.

• Our wine knowledge database, to process wine lists and make them searchable by identifying and sorting bottle sizes, vintages and prices. The database also identifies the many ways in which a single wine might be named on merchants' wine lists. Our software allocates wines to the appropriate Wine Region and Grape Variety, and attaches scores and ratings given by Wine Critics and Competitions & Awards. We use the latter to generate best buy wine recommendations based on quality/price ratios.

• Our free iPhone App, released in 2013. See: Wine-Searcher iPhone App.

There are several ways for you to build our search capabilities into your own website. See: Integrate Wine-Searcher with your Website.