redesigning lclark.edu

L&C Search

Choosing and designing our site search

This month we’ve started planning how to build the best search ever for Lewis & Clark.  And we’re strongly considering Google Site Search (GSS).  It’s an excellent service, but we’re not sure if it’s the right tool for the job.  I ran a few quick comparisons between GSS and Sphinx on one of my websites — a new online version of the Oregon Revised Statutes.  When I made this search feature, I went with Sphinx because I had a rich object model stored in a SQL database.  It wasn’t much work: excluding look & feel, I implemented the search in a fraction of one day.  Back to the comparison.  Off the bat, I found a few problems with Google’s results.  (NB: I’m not concerned here with differences in appearance, or the snippets.  I also verified that Google had indexed the pages I’d like it to find.)

Here are my site’s results for “robbery“:

And here are the GSS results:

The problems seen with Google Site Search in this small test

1. A problem of unwanted exclusion:  Robbery in the second degree is missing.    Notice also that the results are limited to one page, and the “very similar” rest can be seen after clicking the link.  Maybe Robbery 2 would appear there.

2. A problem of unwanted inclusion:  (I don’t care about the blog hits — those can be filtered out.)  Notice the appearance of 166.715 Definitions in the GSS results, but not OregonLaws.org’s.  This page is actually fairly irrelevant to robbery.  So why did Google rank it so high?  Google is solving a different problem than OregonLaws.org.  Google indexes web pages, but can’t know how important each one is.  And so, their innovation is to look at the number and quality of links to a page, and consider each one a “vote” for it.  My theory is that GSS ranks these Definitions pages high because so many other pages on the site link back to them.

But what about OregonLaws.org’s search?  How does it know to rank the Definition pages so low?  Easy.  When making the site, I know which pieces are important.  I don’t need to look at something as tangentially related as incoming links.  Take a look: here’s the algorithm I used to implement the search for ORS Sections:

 define_index do
    indexes title
    indexes body
    indexes number
    indexes annotations
    set_property :field_weights =>
      {”number” => 10, “title” => 6, “body” => 3, “annotations” => 2}
 end

This is the Ruby on Rails code.  It should be easy to see what’s going on.  My website assembles pages from “objects”.  One object type is “ORS Section”, which has attributes such as title, body, number, and annotations.  It has other attributes too, but I don’t want the search to account for them, so I left those out.  And finally, I’ve set relative weights for each of these fields which produce the relevant search results I want.

Epilog: Another small problem

Google has similar pages links.  OregonLaws.org has more like this.  Here are the results when clicking the respective similar/more link under Robbery first degree:

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LC Redesign: Strategy Phase Complete

Prior to my arrival here at Lewis & Clark, the institution went through a very significant strategic communications process. This process highlighted communication issues that we as an institution needed to address to be more successful in communicating to our various audiences. (Haven’t seen this? Read the  Message Platform.) Long story short, one of the major initiatives to come out of this process was the need to redesign the website, and in particular to bring its design and content in line with who we are as LC.

So, we went through an RFP process to get some help with what we expected would be a major effort and after six proposals and two presentations, we selected White Whale (WW), a small company that consults on educational web design and development. Frankly, they seemed like the coolest, smartest people around and in mid-March when we began to work with them, we learned our expectations were right on.

The first thing we did was set out what out goals were for this phase of the project — the strategy phase. Specifically, we outlined three primary goals:

  • complete a visual redesign of the home pages, to make the site better reflect who we are as a community;
  • re-architect the navigation and content to make it more accessible and again better reflect us; and,
  • assess the future of our content management system to decide what features or abilities it should have, and whether Trillium would be able to fulfill those needs.

The goals above are the big picture, and each has developed a number of elements that are also significant, but we’ll tackle those in the discussion that is to follow.

And what is to follow? There is a lot of discussion to come here — White Whale started us off with meetings across the three campuses with all kinds of people and the discussions that we had have formed a good part of the direction this redesign has taken. Since that time, we’ve worked through the major goals above completing our strategy phase and are ready to present all of this for comment from you, the LC community.

So, without further adieu, we’ll start with the visual design in the next post, then bring in further discussions on the navigation and content, as well as Trillium in the next few posts. And look for posts from Jason Pontius, president of White Whale will be jumping in here to author and comment as well.

I do hope you’ll participate. We’ve spent a good bit of time talking about ampersands and word marks, in addition to how to foster “community” and reduce the siloing that occurs both without and within the three schools that are Lewis & Clark. But that isn’t enough, we want your thoughts, impressions and opinions on this redesign.

Join us.

David W. McKelvey
Director of New Media
Public Affairs and Communicationsmckelvey@lclark.edu

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Starting Monday March 17th, the Redesign

Some History

In mid-January, I sent out a request for proposal (RFP) to about ten different firms, large and small, local and distant, that had come up on our radar as potential companies that would be able and well-suited to help us form the strategy for our website redesign. Two weeks later, after a process of meeting and talking with several companies, six proposals were submitted.

Our small committee of Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and myself reviewed the proposals and selected two firms to invite to campus for informal two-hour “interviews.” (At this point, it should be noted that both firms were excellent and would clearly be able to handle the job. What we really needed to discover was what the working relationship would be like.)

Both accepted and we met with each of their teams during mid-February. Those sessions gave us lots to think about, and after consulting with members of New Media, PubCom and a few others across campus, it was still very close. (And what really threw helped us solidify our decision was the responses from the references provided.)

With that, I’m pleased to announce that White Whale (WW), a small educationally-focused web design firm from Oakland, Calif. will become our partner in forming the forthcoming web redesign strategy.

What’s Next

A week or so ago, we officially signed the contract and I’m happy to report that beginning tomorrow, March 17th, Jason, Tonya, Donald, and Alex — all of White Whale — will be on campus to meet with select groups over three days to hear from all of you what should become of our web site.

And as of this posting we’re opening up authorship of this blog so that WW can participate in and communicate about the web redesign as we’re all working through the process. (One of the reasons that WW rose to the top was due to their very collaborative process with their client-partners.)

So, if you have some thoughts about the web redesign, be sure to:

  • communicate them with any of us, WW, IT or New Media;
  • stop us if you see us in the Trailroom or elsewhere around campus; and,
  • watch this blog to continue the conversation.

There’s a lot more to come over the next few days in particular; I’ll be posting more soon.

David

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Google Mini

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.

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