Caltech Webmasters Forum: Past Meetings

Google Search Appliance

Caltech owns a Google search appliance (GSA) that crawls the Caltech websites continuously...new pages take about 24 hours to appear in the search results.
HANDOUT/LINK: http://www.caltech.edu/search/about/indexing

How to build webpages that achieve a better ranking within Google.
- Google places a heavy emphasis on keywords that appear within the "text" of a website. The <title>, text in the first several paragraphs and META keywords are areas where it helps to include keywords.
- SURF/LIGO example
  - SURF had problems with a specific search string not returning their pages ("undergraduate research" +"summer" +"stipend") while LIGO's undergrad research page appeared as the top entry.
  - The word "stipend" turned out to the issue. "Stipend" appeared several times in the LIGO page, but did not appear anywhere on the SURF page. To improve SURF's page ranking, the word "stipend" was added to the text of several pages. On the SURF homepage, "stipend" was added to the META keywords embedded in the HTML.
- HANDOUT - O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" Hack #93 (search engine optimization)
- HANDOUT - Google: Publishing Best Practices
Using "KeyMatches" to promote specific web pages. [input on the GSA]
- KeyMatches allow you to direct users to a specific web page by associating specific search words or phrases with the web page. Queries containing the KeyMatch words/phrases will return a link to the specified web page along with the search results. Works great if the user is already searching using our appliance, but has no effect on searches from public search engines.

How to add Caltech Google search coding to your web pages, so that visitors can search the content of your website.
HANDOUT/LINK: http://www.caltech.edu/search/about/search-html
Using "front ends" to customize the Google search results page. [input on the GSA]
Using "collections" to organize searches...collections are subsets of the main search index. [input on the GSA]