1. Google Search Appliance: improving the search experience
John Crowe

2. What is it? Yellow box of search magic!
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the University’s own Google search engine
GSA works the same as google.co.uk
We choose the set of pages that the GSA crawls
Any University website can make use of it

3. Search on the corporate site
External-facing pages only
9% of visits (over 100,000) to the corporate site in the last month involved a search
Four times as many searches for portal than for law or psychology
30% of searches resulted in user leaving corporate site e.g. portal, library, staffnet
Some people even search for the staff directory, despite the website/staff radio buttons
It’s time for a rethink…

4. Improvements One search box for everything (external and internal)
Simplified user interface:
Larger, more prominent search box
Remove website/staff radio buttons
Incorporate staff search
Remove advanced search
Make use of more GSA features

5. StaffNet search
In the recent StaffNet survey people were dissatisfied with search more than anything else
“I don’t use the search on StaffNet. I use Google.”
It’s time for a rethink…

6. Search on your website Get access to the GSA
Define your collection of pages
Use analytics to regularly check what your users are searching for
Improve SEO for google.co.uk

7. GSA features Key matches Insert a search result at the top of the list
Similar to ads on google.co.uk (but we can style them however we want)

8. Search suggestions
Suggestions appear as user types in search box
Helps to eliminate common spelling mistakes e.g. accomodation
List of suggestions is user-generated, updated daily
Maintain a suggestion blacklist in GSA

9. Dynamic result clusters
Refine the original search query
Get more accurate results
Result cluster is generated by the GSA based on pages indexed

10. Dynamic navigation
Navigate within search results
Relies on metadata

11. Feeds
Include web pages and documents in the collection that cannot be found through links on crawled pages e.g. records in a database
Secure content
GSA can index password-protected content
Not available currently
Needs to be configured
Search as you type

12. Document preview (coming soon)
Works for PDF, DOC, PPT