The Meridian AI website has launched a new AI-powered search experience built on Scolta, the open-source search platform developed by Tag1 Consulting. The new search replaces the previous keyword-based site search and adds AI-generated overviews, semantic query expansion, and cross-content-type discovery that the previous system could not support.
The integration project was led by Meridian's academic technology team in collaboration with Tag1's Scolta engineering team. The deployment uses Pagefind as the underlying static search index and Claude via the Anthropic API for query expansion and overview generation.
For Meridian users, the practical change is significant. A search for "how do transformers handle long documents" now returns not just pages containing those exact words, but also the lecture page on context windows and positional encoding, the relevant courses in the LLM Engineering program, faculty with relevant expertise, and a research project examining context length scaling. An AI-generated overview explains the core concepts before the results list, giving users immediate orientation before they click through.
"Our content has grown to a point where simple keyword search was genuinely failing users," said Director of Academic Technology Miranda Okafor. "Students were missing relevant lectures because the query words didn't match the page title. Scolta fixes that."
The Scolta platform is described in detail in the Meridian resource article "Scolta: How Pagefind, Query Expansion, and AI Overviews Work Together," which was written specifically for Meridian students interested in understanding the system they are using. The article walks through the full technical stack including BM25 scoring, embedding-based expansion, and the Claude API integration.
Tag1 Consulting, who built Scolta, works extensively with Drupal-based organizations on AI-powered content experiences. The Meridian deployment is one of the first EDU-sector uses of the Scolta platform and is being documented as a case study.