PDI 2008 Sessions: Search Tools for Your Web Site

What is it?

Various search tools can be used to create a customized search for a Web site. Components may include:

Provide users with an additional way to navigate your site
- Links and navigation menus are the traditional way to navigate the Web
- Search is especially important for sites with many pages
Many other sites have a search box so users expect it
- Ideally every page on your site should have a site search box
- Search box is most often found in the page header
Improve staff intranet productivity
Find errors in order to improve page content
- Assure that all important content is indexed
Create a custom search engine for a group or research topic
- Can include content from any sites on the Internet

Interface is easy to customize using Libraries template
- Results are Google-like, with Google Custom Search logo
- Added code for menu to narrow search to one subdirectory
- Can search content on multiple servers (lib and digital)
Keywords to narrow search
Sites/URLs to include or exclude, wildcards allowed
Editions: standard has ads, business/university/nonprofits do not
Add to Google home page, get code
Refinements to label categories in some sites
Look and feel of search box and results
Code to copy and paste in your search and results pages
Collaboration of contributors, invited or volunteers
Preview - try out your searches

Turnkey server (hardware and software) in our server room
Interface is fairly easy to customize using Libraries template
- Menu of collections to narrow search
- No Google branding needed
Crawl and Index
- Crawl URLs - patterns to start, follow, or not crawl
- Crawl Schedule - continuous or specific days/times
- Crawler Access - internal, password-protected, proxy servers
- Collections - groups of URL patterns to search together
Serving
- Front ends - separate interfaces for public, staff, test
  - Output format, KeyMatch, related queries, remove URLs
Status and Reports
- Crawl status - documents found/crawled/served
- Crawl diagnostics - URLs crawled, excluded or with errors
- Content statistics - documents by file type
- Search reports - collections, dates, keywords, queries
Administration
- User accounts - admin or manager, collections, frontends
- Reset index - clear database and start
- Import/export configuration - backup all settings
- System, network, SNMP, certificates, SSL, LDAP, license

Public and staff/restricted interfaces (front ends)
Interface of Search and result pages can be customized?
- page layout, header, footer, colors, styles, ads
Faceted search
- left navigation links to subcategories or topics with fixed # of items
- e.g. dates, countries, languages, subjects
Collections (limit search to specific folders or sets of URLs you define)
KeyMatch (staff-suggested URLs for highly-used keywords)
Spellchecker ("did you mean...") and suggestions for related terms
Advanced search
- Keywords/phrases (and, or, not, exact phrase, part of word)
- Limit (to a collection, language, format, domain, or field)
- Sort (by relevance, date, title, etc.)
- Output format (# results per page, long/short/URL, group by site)
Duplicates/similar items are removed or grouped?
XML search results available (for flexible formatting by scripts/XSLT)?

Provider: Commercial? Cost? Licensing? Open source?
Limits: # domains, pages, queries; ads, vendor branding
Platform: Windows or Unix? Apache or IIS? Programming language?
Performance: Searches must be fast or users will go elsewhere
Administration: Multiple administrators? Roles?
Ease of configuration: GUI-based and/or file-based?
Support: phone/email, user community, documentation, training, upgrades, longevity