Google Mini

• 17 November 2007
• David McKelvey

I had recently been in an email conversation with Kim Brodkin regarding the difficulty she was having with the L&C search (specifically related to the Multicultural Symposium). I’ve reprinted part of our conversation here with her permission. First, from Kim:

Until last week, if a visitor to the LC website typed “multicultural symposium” into the “search” box on the home page, the recommended websites did not include the page for the Multicultural Symposium, but the list did include the symposia for International Affairs and Environmental Studies. A quick call to Noah resulted in an immediate correction of this significant problem, and we were grateful to him for fixing this instantly. Because the URL for the symposium is so long and unwieldy, it is vital for people to be able to visit the website and get to the symposium with as few clicks as possible. Because there was no mention of the event anywhere else on the main page, the “search” box serves as important way to locate our site.

This is not a new issue, as part of our search is “hand-done” and we are working on a solution to automate it more easily. But, it occurred to me that frankly, a lot of people probably don’t know this. So, in addition to the “short links” about which I’ve just posted, Lewis & Clark has purchased and installed a Google Mini.

Essentially, a Google Mini is a computer that lives in the server room and spends it’s time both crawling and categorizing your site, and delivering up results to people like you and me doing searches of the site. The difference between it and Google itself is that we (in this case IT, New Media and the libraries) get to help refine it’s search results. The Google Mini is in testing now, so that when we release it, it’s producing results at or better than currently provided, but I have no specific release date yet. (I’m sure I’ll post something here when it comes online if you’re keen on it.)

With the help of the Google Mini and short links, we should be able to better help promote significant events.

Filed Under

• L&C Search
• New Media Services