Campus Web Publishers and Developers,

With over 400,000 web pages at Boston University, a good search tool plays a crucial role in helping people quickly find information. Since 1998, Boston University has used the Ultraseek search engine. That has changed. On August 18, we launched the Google Search Appliance, a product that companies and organizations can use to index their own websites with Google’s highly regarded technology.

Whenever you search the BU Web from the main search page or from dozens of departmental search pages, such as the Library Search, you will use Google automatically. In addition to improved search results, Google has features that should be familiar to campus publishers:

• Departmental Searches: Google offers confined, departmental searches, just like Ultraseek. Departmental searches continue to work without any intervention required of departmental web managers.
  
• Quick Links: Google offers Key Matches, which are similar to Quick Links. Recall that Quick Links allow a department to assign specific keywords or phrases to specific web pages. When a visitor searches the BU Web using one or more of those keywords or phrases, the site is prominently displayed at the top of the results page.

Ultraseek has long reported that there are about 250,000 web pages at BU. Based on that information, we purchased a Google license for 300,000 pages. However, Google has found over 400,000 pages, primarily because it is better than Ultraseek at indexing pages that are dynamically generated from databases.

In order to stay within our license, we removed some sites from Google, including people.bu.edu, cs-people.bu.edu, and some of the database sites, which typically have their own search functions. This removal is only temporary. We have purchased an upgrade to 500,000 pages and will have this increased capacity in place in early September. We will add all affected sites back to Google at that time.

Richard Mendez
Office of Information Technology