Information about the IU search service

To improve the Indiana University search engine, University Information Technology Services (UITS) has licensed a Google search appliance (G-5005) with support for two million pages. The Search Engine Evaluation Team, comprised of individuals from the Office of Communications Management, the User Support Center, the School of Education, the Systems Integration Team, and several other stakeholders, selected the Google search appliance based on responses to a search engine evaluation.

Bringing the Google search appliance into the IU infrastructure provides the following advantages for web site administrators:

• Control over the crawling schedule
  
  
  • The Google search appliance crawls the IU web continuously and can be adjusted as needed.
  • The Google commercial service updates the university index approximately monthly.
  
  
• In-house management of KeyMatches (equivalent to the commercial service's "sponsored links"), search term synonyms, and subcollections
  
  
• The ability to crawl and index pages unavailable to outside search engines, such as those restricted due to FERPA or HIPAA regulations

Users will enjoy the following benefits:

• Better and quicker search results
  
  
• Advanced search features, including searching for PDF, .doc, and .ppt files, and displaying them as HTML
  
  
• Easy and powerful search administration
  
  
• Easy integration into web sites

The switch to the Google search appliance will not change the way other search engines index the IU site. When the IU site is modified, the Google search appliance automatically re-crawls and updates the search index, providing users with the most current search results.

Note: Until web site owners add custom headers and footers, search results will appear using standard Google formatting.

If you have questions about IU's Google search appliance, contact  searchiu@indiana.edu .

Comments/Questions/Corrections