[1188] in magellan
Web Search Service October 2003 Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joanne M. Hallisey)
Fri Nov 21 09:51:01 2003
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Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 09:41:47 -0500
To: Magellan@mit.edu, search-engines@mit.edu
From: "Joanne M. Hallisey" <hallisey@MIT.EDU>
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October 2003 Status Report
Project Name: Web Search Service
Project Leader: Joanne Hallisey
Report Date: November 3, 2003
URL: http://web.mit.edu/is/discovery/search/
Accomplishments in October:
- Make test collections starting from the list of offices, and index
URLs of the form http://web.mit.edu/{a,b,...}, stopping when the
Google collection reaches close to our 300,000 url limit.
- Investigate how multiple urls pointing to a document impacts the
Google search.
- Create test query pages and results look-and-feel for our user
testing. Remove vendor information from both, so that the testers
won't know which search engine produces which results.
- analyze data from daily logs of search.mit.edu users.
- Begin financial comparison of Google service to Ultraseek service.
Requested information on contract size of 1 million and 2 million
documents for better comparison
- Begin draft of initial Discovery findings and comparisons.
- Continued comparison of Ultraseek and Google search capabilities.
Noted that they have different algorithms which makes it difficult to
compare.- Determined that 300,000 documents was not adequate for
meeting MIT's needs.
- Continued "tests" of small collections to compare results. Found
that Google "discovers" and crawls some directories we did not expect
it to, such as "http://web.mit.edu/activity". We restricted the
crawling to only crawl URLs of the form http://web.mit.edu/lockername
- Ran daily scripts for inktomilogs.
- Meet with Barbara Johnson to begin preparation for usability
testing to compare the two search engines.
- Decided to test at least 3 in each of the following categories:
students, non-MIT and staff.
Goals for November:
- Recruit testers.
- Prepare test environment.
- Prepare test materials/tasks.
- Schedule tests.
- Continue to refine requirements and begin thinking about the recommendation.
- Recruit someone from Training and Publications to assist with the
documentation for the search service.
- Begin to draft a business plan.
- Begin to draft a support and service plan.
Ongoing tasks
- Ask Google about SSL capacity for later use - August
- Review rules for existing search service
- Determine final definition for data sets for new service
- Define rules for new service
- Contact Resources to determine how to appropriately thank Google
- Determine solution for conversion of query forms if required.
Next community milestone:
None scheduled.
Issues:
Comparing the two agreements is difficult as the terms are based on
annual fees for Google licensing and a one time license fee for
Ultraseek.
Key learnings:
Team dynamics:
Good.
Additional comments:
None
