Search sub-group
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2:30 p.m. in Needles Hall (NH) 3043
Present: Allan, Bill, Megan (chair), Lauren, Isaac, Kevin, Paul, Glen Regrets: none
1. Introduction & Overview
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Why are we here, what do we want to cover?
2. Issues with current University of Waterloo search
- the "new" search vs. "old" search
- problems or feature requests for the "new" search
- using the "new" search across campus
- agreed sites should be using common search; may be able to redirect old search URLs to new (should work)
- discussion of methods to search multiple servers; library using Google custom search, Information Systems & Technology (IST) sending multiple URLs through Google Ajax API.
- custom search, defined at Google > can include/exclude different sites, google generates code for search box.
- how to integrate this with main University of Waterloo search so it all works together?
- search results not working properly in some cases? Need to define when.
- not always interested in seeing the people & keywords; customizing the people & keyword searches
- option to pass header with options to turn them off?? Option to relate keyword with site.
- substitute people search block with link to related contact page? How to do this?
- can we get sitelinks? or spell checking.
- does google limit to a certain number of searches per day?
3. Possibility of investigating other search solutions
- Google seems to be de facto standard
- many other options available to try, including Open Text, lucine (open source)?,various other enterprise options are really good but expensive
- library implementing something as a replacement for catalogue search; can test with web page search as well
- agreed that Google is working fine and doesn't need to be replaced at this time; other options often expensive and difficult to maintain
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in current template/current praces
- meta tags are in template
- not covered in training courses, people probably don't mean anything
- should be removed from template (better to have no meta tags than non-unique meta tags)
- idea to use keywords from meta tags in keyword search
- generally agreed that SEO practices across campus are poor. A great search engine cannot compensate for poor SEO. Education is needed.
5. Education on making pages search engine friendly
- education on how search works and how to make pages search-engine friendly
- Eva may have covered some of this in web writing workshop
- idea to have pages or search results critiqued
- suggestion to hold until we get the search cleaned up and ported across campus
-- MeganMcDermott - 16 June 2008