Search May 15 2008

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

  • 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