[617] in I/T Delivery
Search Improvements for the MIT Home Page - Monthly Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Suzana Lisanti)
Wed Nov 7 09:03:46 2001
Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20011107085738.00ac57b0@po14.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 09:05:51 -0500
To: delivery@mit.edu
From: Suzana Lisanti <lisanti@MIT.EDU>
Cc: mithome@mit.edu, web-team@mit.edu
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Project Name: Search Improvements for the MIT Home Page
Project Team: Suzana Lisanti, Anne Salemme
Report Date: 6 November 2001
Project URL: http://web.mit.edu/is/delivery/search
General
------------
This delivery project involves finding more intuitive ways to enable users
to search MIT web sites. Now that we are indexing approximately 1 million
urls, too many documents are returned on a search engine query. This
project will implement changes to the search engine interface and back-end,
resulting in a more rational presentation of search engine results to the
users of the MIT home page.
Accomplishments during October:
------------------------------------------
- Launched project
- Defined the project scope and approach to solving the problem.
Goals for November:
-----------------------------
- Install Athena and latest version of Inktomi search engine on
a machine which will replace bigsearch.mit.edu at some point
- Begin to define a strategy for making world-readable MIT web pages
available via the home page search function (collections, etc.)
Issues:
-----------
- Distinguish between internal collections of data on the search
engine, default collections that are searched by any query form,
and special collections that are searched only by special forms
- Define two types of users of the search engine: users looking for
things (i.e., using query forms), and web site maintainers
(who care how their sites get indexed, and who may write their own
query forms)
- Define the query form that users see on the MIT home page, and how
returned results should look
- Investigate new features provided by the latest version of Inktomi
Upcoming:
---------------
- Regular weekly meetings.
Team Dynamics:
--------------------
- Fine.
Suzana Lisanti
Director, MIT Web Communications Services
N42-040
(617) 253-0100
