Hi folks,
What search engines are people currently using in HEIs? I've seen little on
this since Brian's last survey back in 2002
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-watch/intro.html)
At Aberdeen we were running both htDig and Google's University Search, but
ending up withdrawing htDig as it couldn't cope with the size of our site
and was producing mainly irrelevant results, to the point where it was
worse than useless. At the minute we've solely got Google.
Whilst this free facility generally produces extremely relevant results
with typical Google accuracy, it has several significant limitations, viz:
- its index is not comprehensive as htDig's
- it cannot be configured to search non-abdn.ac.uk domains
- the index is updated on average only every 4 weeks; thus recently
amended or new content does not immediately appear in results
- we have no control over when the site is reindexed
- we are subject to Google's algorithims and thus cannot affect the order
in which results are displayed
I've seen Sebastian's useful evaluation of the Google appliance
(http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oucsweb/google.xml), but would be interested to
hear others' experiences of alternatives (particularly open source ones,
needless to say).
We're running Apache/UNIX/PHP 4.3.7, if that has any relevance.
If folk want to reply to me, I'll summarise to the list.
Regards,
Mike
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Mike McConnell
Web Team Manager
University of Aberdeen
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http://www.abdn.ac.uk/web/
Directorate of Information Systems and Services
Edward Wright Building
Dunbar Street
Aberdeen
AB24 3UF
Tel: +44 (0)1224 27 2602
Fax: +44 (0)1224 27 3372
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