www.monash.edu.au

Sue.Steele@its.monash.edu.au

Scoped web site search:

an Australian university

case study

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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?

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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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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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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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Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study

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Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study

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Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study

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Scoped web site search: an Australian university case study