Search v0.4 was released. In this release, we fixed a few bugs as well as a few features that incorporate some of the remaining out of the box Google Search Appliance features including:

Display a link to ‘more results from …’
Indent results if they are related to each other
Specify the format of the search results (pdf, text file, etc)
suggestion box close link

In addition to how the out of the box features function, we have also provided a method for doing an exact phrase search without having to put quotes around it or having to go to advanced search. Most of our user base, looking through the search reports, do not put quotes around items. Is this because they do not want to find an exact search, or just that the understanding that search by defaults tries to find all words in a page, not necessarily the exact phrase? We hope by providing this, it may make those who are in the latter group, the ability to easily perform an exact search with a click, rather than typing quotes.

Next steps for search are we will be working with Web Communications and University Advancement on some possible UI changes. The goal is to see how to make search more robust and feature rich, and the right UI for it. We’ll be looking to perform some focus groups to search to see what it is people are expecting, and as always, we welcome any feedback.

In addition to UI, we are looking to add more CWS features, such as the ability to see and filter results based on the list of domains we index. This allows individuals to also see what sites we actually are indexing, and if your sites are not there, to let us know. Some sites are excluded based on the number of results, as our license limit is only 1 million docs.  You can read our previous article about this.

A maintenance release was pushed to production for Search, version 0.3.1.

For those who haven’t noticed the capabilities of search, look at the options, if a word is typed in, there may be some suggestions offered.  At the bottom is related searches, if you misspell a word, you may see a “Did you mean…”.  Also, domain search has been added to the Advanced Search.  Did you notice these changes?  We implemented all this in a front end, meaning we look at the features Google has, create an interface to the appliance, and then place things where we need to place it.  The front end also serves a dual purpose, if for future reasons, the backend, aka the Google Appliance is replaced, we simply rewrite the front end to work with the new back end.  More importantly, the front end allows us to do other certain aspects, like implement our feedback module.

Now with a front end, it also means we may have minor bugs, which is why we release the maintenance version for minor bugs.  It may simply be things like formatting, or some case we did not handle that the appliance handles.

We’ll be continuing to look at enhancing search, and integrate other aspects with it as we move ahead.  There has been minimal feedback to date, and without feedback, we cannot know how we can improve it.  So if you have a comment let us know.

Thanks!  Your Central Web Services Group

As part of the next search release, we now have a quick feedback module.  If you are looking for a particular search which you know is on a specific site, for example, on forestry.oregonstate.edu, and you do not find that, what do you do?  Well, let us know.

It is entirely possible that sites are not indexed into our search engine, so just send us a quick feedback with the url.  If you want to be contacted, provide us with contact information as well, or instead use our full help form.

If you want to let us know anything else about the layout or design, then just tell us more.  Enter the information and just click Send Feedback, and your feedback will come to us.  We try to be mind readers as best as possible, but there are particulars which we may not be able to pick up on.  If there is something we can do about your feedback, if it helps many students, faculty, and staff, we do want to look at how we could accomplish it.

Thank You, Your Central Web Services Team

You’ve probably come here maybe because you clicked on the Keyword link from our search page, or you came across our blog, or from blogs.o.e.  But however you arrived here is secondary to the information that you want.

What is a Keyword, how do I get one?  The first part is easy, a Keyword is a prominent link that is top of results based on, well, keywords.  Google calls it Keymatch, but we are keeping our prior terminology of Keyword.  So for example, a keyword could be “academic calendar” which when you type in search, displays in a shaded area above the result set, that when you click the link takes you to the catalog for the academic calendar.

So how do you get one?  In our previous search engine, we would have to enter keywords into a database manually, and there was no policy on establishing keywords, and as the keywords grew and grew, the maintenance in ensuring links were fresh was too much of an overhead.

With the new Google Search Appliance, we are operating in a different mode, we have data to look at, and with good search engine optimization for your pages, organic results should be improved.

It was previously necessary for keywords for many users, but with a better organic result set, we can minimize the number of keywords we have to maintain.  With the ability now to see what are the top queries that both get and don’t get results, we can make some intelligent determination on what should be keywords.  For others, we do recommend that you optimize your page for search engines, and there is information about it on Google’s site.  The basics on it though if you don’t want to read all about it is, one, relevant content, and two, other sites to link to your site.

We’ll be looking at other approaches in the future to build upon the need for additional promotion, but for now, a data-driven approach is what we will be looking at for a fresh approach to searching by keywords.  So for now, we will not be taking user requests for keywords.  Stay tuned to this blog for changes.  In the future we hope to make the search reports accessible via a web interface that any user can visit.  If you have feedback, please contact us, or leave a comment here.

With the release of the Advanced Search function, we have released Search as production.  Hmm, what does that mean?  Well, now if you go to the original search site, at search.oregonstate.edu, it is the new Google Search Appliance search.  So does that mean that’s it you ask?  Well, no.  There’s still more features coming, like Narrow Your Search and Keywords, which we’ll discuss more about in the near future.  For now, look at the advanced search.  If you really are looking to search, and you don’t find what you are looking for, don’t give up.  Try the advanced search feature, add more words, exclude words, pick a specific file format.  There are several file formats you can look to find.

Now if you don’t find what you are looking for, it could be that the site you are looking to search might be new and not crawled yet, or it might not be hosted with us, so we are not aware it needs to be crawled.  In this case, all you have to do is just let us know what the site is, and we’ll look to crawl.  Read our other post on exceptions to get additional information as well on what we don’t crawl.