Google Search Solution Implemented for UF

Searching for information on the UF Website got a little easier in August. UF switched to using a search engine from Google, the popular Internet search site that ranks search results according to relevance.

For UF, this means a search solution that is completely internalized. The hardware and software are all housed at UF, so that's where the search inquiries will be processed. In addition, it's platform-independent, which addresses the challenge of the distributed computing environment that comprises UF, and is easy for administrators to set up and customize.

"We took the Google Search Appliance and our previous solution and plugged the top 100 searches from the UF home page into both to see who gave us the most relevant results. Hands down, Google beat the solution we used before," said Mark Trammell, UF Web administrator.

The new solution combs all of the different operating systems in the various locations that are under the UF Web umbrella. "We have webmasters at the university, college, and departmental levels of our domain hierarchy. On top of that many professors are running their own web servers," Trammell continued. "We have offices in every county in the state of Florida, many with their own servers. And all of them certainly want their content crawled."

The Google GB-1001 Search Appliance takes all these factors into account to return more than 27,000 UF Web queries on a busy day.

Directions for creating a custom search page using UF's Google search engine are located at http://www.webadmin.ufl.edu/resources/tutorials.

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