Search Engine Developments

Jon Warbrick
University of Cambridge Computing Service

jon.warbrick@ucs.cam.ac.uk

Current architecture

Previous

CUDN &

cam.ac.uk

Rest of

the world

Future architecture

Current

The future – Ultraseek 5.3

Spell checking?

Passage-based summaries?

Wild card queries?

Thesaurus and smart 'no hits' page?

Quick links?

Following links in JavaScript?

In-document term highlighting?

Your assistance requested...

Dissatisfaction with the search engine

Commonly unsubstantiated

Google would be better!

The problem with intranets

Please

Tell us about problems

Consider searching when authoring documents

Any questions?

Some of you will have seen some of these slides before...

... but they have been carefully updated for today

This is how things were until a couple of weeks ago

A single search engine...

... indexing University servers...

... from within the CUDN...

... being used by clients on the CUDN and outside

This presents a problem for cam-only content which was therefore normally excluded

This is how it is now:

Two engines indexing University servers, one inside the CUDN, one outside

A 'front end' server which controls access to the 'real' engines

CUDN users, by default, are directed to the engine on the CUDN

Non-CUDN users are directed, by default, to the non-CUDN engine

Direct access to the underlying engines (CUDN only) for webmasters

Name and IP Access controls should work automatically

Here's what it looks like

This is the view for a Non-CUDN user

Note the yellow box

The yellow box for an external user

The yellow box for an internal user

The yellow box for other search scopes

Other features, all of which need a version upgrade

Note that deployment of Packaged-based Summaries will override the production of a summary based on the Description META-tag

We are currently hearing of dissatisfaction with the search engine

Beware that a search engine on an INTRANET is never going to work as well as a search engine on the internet

Your help is needed to resolve some of this

Search Engine Developments

Slides from a talk to University of Cambridge Webmasters, June 2005

2005-06-23T11:00:06