A New and Improved Search Engine
One of the most requested new Web site features we heard from faculty, staff, and students during our redesign discovery process was improved search. To paraphrase some of the comments we heard – “when I search the college site I get a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what I’m searching for.”
So one of the priorities of the redesign project was to improve site search. So after looking at several different options, we purchased a Google Mini search appliance, which arrived in the mail this week from Google.
The Google Mini will provide us with everything we currently get with Google search (including a familiar interface), but will provide us with more control over site search as well as more detailed reporting as noted below.
- Additional Reporting
More detailed reports on what content the Mini’s crawler has indexed and will index, as well as errors that the Mini found when crawling our site. Also, more detailed reports on what visitors are searching for on our site. - Site Indexing
We can specify which pages or sections of our site are crawled and indexed to show up in search results or not indexed. We can also specify the frequency at which pages on our site are crawled. - Google Analytics Integration
Better understand how visitors are using our public Web site and improve the effectiveness of our search results. - Keyword
Allows us to specify keywords that return specific results when someone searches our site. For example, if someone searches for Dining on our site, we can associate that keyword with Dining Services and the URL for their site (rather than getting a top search result pointing to an academic paper on how to eat healthy when dining out). So whenever someone searches for Dining the link will appear at the top of the search no matter where it would normally appear in the result set. - Synonyms
Synonyms will give alternate terms for your search. For example, when a visitor searches for “Academic Minors” we can add suggestions, e.g., “Academic Certificates,” to the result set. - Document Types
The Google Mini, like our current Google search, will search for multiple document types and display the document types in the results. The Mini can search more than 220 file types, including html, aspx, php, pdf, office documents, etc.
Since 2002, the college has been using Google’s free custom search engine (formerly Google University Search). It’s used by many colleges and universities since it’s free and search results can be served up without displaying ads. However, since it’s free, it lacks a lot of the more robust features sought by institutions. Features you typically find with a paid search engine, like enhanced reporting, keywords, synonyms, setting site crawl frequency, etc.
We will continue to use Google Custom Search, but only as a back up to our Google Mini appliance should it go down (knock on wood). Once the Mini is installed, we’ll then need to configure the Mini to output results within our new CMS templates, which is something we will be working on in early December.
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