Trinity College Dublin launch their Google Search Appliance
– posted October 24th, 2006 by Laurence Veale Comments (2)
Trinity College Dublin have just gone live with their Google Search Appliance.
Just spotted on the Trinity IS Services alerts page, was the announcement of search.tcd.ie, the search portal for the entire university.
What’s really interesting about this development, is that Trinity is made up of a number of schools and faculties, each of which have their own sub-sites. Visitors to the Trinity website may not be aware of this distinction, a commonly encountered issue which I discussed in my navigation versus search blog post. Now, though, it really doesn’t matter because visitors can get straight to the content they’re looking for accurately and rapidly through the Google Search Appliance.
Using the Google logo in the search interface?
On a topic I discussed recently in another blog post, Google Search Appliance and using the Google Logo, Trinity have opted to incorporate the Google logo. Why? In their own words:
As well as providing better, faster, more up-to-date results in the familiar Google interface known to web users the world over, it will allow more individual College web pages, and more document types (including pdf files), to be indexed and served out as search results than ever before.
Digg this post Submit to del.icio.us Submit to technorati
Categories Enterprise Search, Spotted
2 comments so far
1. Eoghan McCabe on Oct 24th, 2006 - 11:50
Excellent. Fair play to IS Services. I always found the old TCD search feature to be exceptionally bad. Used to just use Google anyway. I presume this will index the local pages too?
2. Lar on Oct 24th, 2006 - 13:32
It certainly index local pages as well as databases and external applications. It’s not just about web content.
What I remember about the TCD search was the boolean and fuzzy search options. The cognitive load of even seeing them was enough to drive me to the Buttery!