Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study

2 Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study What are Australian universities doing with their search engines? What search engine/s do they use? How are search engines implemented across university web sites? –Are they internally consistent? –Could we be doing better?

3 Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study 12 universities offer more than one search engine option Google is the most popular option, offered by 18 universities –11 of these also have another search engine on the site PanOptic is second to Google, used by 7 universities –One of these also offers another search engine on the site (Google)

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6 Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study Why don’t we just use Google? It’s free. Why did we buy a search engine? (the questions I am often asked.) I imagine the answers are similar for a number of universities –Public search is like the tip of the iceberg –We can’t ‘control’ Google results the way we can a local search engine –Our public web presence is not in a single domain

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12 Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study Scoped search – friend or foe? Universities seem to like scoped searches. 25 of us have them on our web sites On 23 of those sites, application of scoped search is not consistent across sub-sites At 4 universities, some sub-sites have no search option

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