Search May 29 2008

Search sub-group

May 29, 2008 at 10:30 a.m., Needles Hall 3043

Action items

  • Megan
    • make the old search look like the new search
  • Paul
    • set up a wiki area for the Search group
  • Lauren
    • find a Google contact for a discussion of options
    • explore if we can turn of ads with the AJAX search Application Programming Interface (API)

Short term search improvements

After some investigation, we concluded that Google discontinued the site search that we are using. The old Google search API had a single site search limit and is now deprecated and custom search is their new solution. Further, University search is now also redirecting to custom search. The free options available to us appear to be the AJAX search API and custom search

There are some tasks that we could undertake to improve the current service. For example, we could make the old search look like the new search (ie. Clean up the old urls and the styling of the new). We could also set tracking on the old search to expose which pages are broken. It was generally agreed that we should try to fix the pages that are currently “broken” if we can do it relatively easily.

Long term options

It could be possible to deploy the AJAX option for units that have a single subdomain to search, and work together to support custom search for people who need to search multiple domains. The AJAX option could be centrally supported for the campus and people who require custom search would also have an option.

In addition there appear to be two enterprise options: Google Site Search and the Google Appliance

We discussed some issues surrounding our search environment in light of these enterprise options:

  • Could we index UW-ACE?
  • Google Appliance would allow us to search if we lost internet connectivity
  • Support for keywords seems to be possible, but it would require a different implementation. The keyword search requires a lot of work to maintain and we discussed the need for keywords and if they are being used. Perhaps we should start exploring Search Engine Optimization. We need to balance the time investment and the use/usability of the current keyword implementation.
  • We could exceed the limit of the current implementation and have greater customization options.
  • These options would allow for Extensible Markup Language (XML) results which could be integrated into other services and styled in a custom manner.

We decided to pursue a contact at Google to give us a presentation to further explore our options and ballpark costs.