myVU - Resources for Faculty and Staff

Web searches now powered by Google

Posted 8/19/2009

Vanderbilt’s university and medical center Web sites have implemented the Google Search Appliance to make information easier to find on the more than 1 million pages that make up the institution’s Web presence.

Information Technology Services purchased, operates and maintains the Google Search Appliance, while the Division of Public Affairs and the medical center Web team administer it, with additional assistance from the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

“Search sits at the center of our digital life, as it enables our community – from students to faculty to staff – to get the information they need to better teach, learn and discover,” Matthew Jett Hall, associate vice chancellor for ITS and associate chief information architect for information architecture, said. “Google remains the market and technology leader in search and online collaborative infrastructure for our community. This infrastructure grows and evolves with the needs of Vanderbilt, and it tracks with the way we work, play and conduct our research lives.”

Unlike Google’s free search and other free searches, the Google Search Appliance provides significant advantages to the enterprise as a whole and to individual schools and departments, including more accurate search results, which can be “tuned” to meet the needs of VU; quicker search response times; easy and powerful search administration; easy integration into Web sites; continuous crawling; the ability to manage customized searches of sites and search result pages; and the ability to index restricted access sites, including intranets.

The Vanderbilt Web search is heavily used, with an average of 240,000 searches conducted per month at the university during the academic year, and 51,000 conducted per month on medical center sites.

The new search engine was launched in July and continues to be fine-tuned in order to return the most relevant results for any given search term.

For questions or assistance with the search engine, e-mail searchsupport@vanderbilt.edu. More information about Vanderbilt’s Google Search Appliance is available at www.vanderbilt.edu/searchsupport.

Contact: Melanie Moran, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu

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