Tue 1 Nov 2005
Google offers a free search solution for educational institutions and non-profit organizations called Google Public Service Search. This allows you to put a search box on your site, which can be used to search your domain or the web as a whole. Google doesn’t include ads on the Public Service searches, and you can turn off the WebSearch feature and restrict searches to your domain only. The search results page is hosted by Google but allows visual customization, including a custom header and footer.
The downside is that each instance can only search over one domain. UCSD already has a Google-powered search that covers the ucsd.edu domain. As I understand it, we can implement a more specific search - for example, the pallter.sio.ucsd.edu domain - but we can’t create a single search we spans multiple specific domains. Thus, it looks like we can’t have an OI search page that searches pallter.sio.ucsd.edu, ccelter.ucsd.edu, etc. all at once.
4 Responses to “Google Search for OI Sites”
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November 1st, 2005 at 4:02 pm
HI Mason,
I changed the category for this post from “Uncategorized” to “Tools”. Interesting about Google search… too bad we can’t search over specific sub-domains.
Maybe we could still use the search API, and hard-wire the various sub-domains into the advanced search filter options like those shown on UCSD’s search? This seems like a possible hack…. worth checking out a little more…
November 1st, 2005 at 4:17 pm
Right, you can use a search query in the form of ’site:site1.ucsd.edu OR site:site2.ucsd.edu’ to search both site1 and site2 in the ucsd.edu domain. We could probably implement a form that would link back to the UCSD search page with the site: options pre-defined. However, we’d lose the visual customization this way, so it might be a good idea to put customized, site-specific searches on each OI site and then include a multi-site search on the Ocean Informatics home page.
November 1st, 2005 at 4:40 pm
We don’t necessarily have to lose our own customization this way. We could simply use php (or perl, etc.) to get the contents from an external search page (UCSD’s Google Search), parse the data, and mold it into our own theme for presentation purposes. This obviously adds some additional overhead which slows down the overall process.
Perhaps the main focus right now should be implementing a search engine for each sub-domain, and worry about a cross-domain search engine later.
December 15th, 2005 at 8:31 pm
[…] The ongoing effort to bring Google Search to the OI sites has made some progress recently. While it turns out that we can’t register sub-domains of ucsd.edu for Google Public Service Search, we can tap in to UCSD’s Google Search Appliance. There are two ways we can do this: […]