About the Search Appliance
What is it?
The University's Google Search Appliance is a powerful cluster of computers that allow everyone to quickly find specific information on University Web pages. It is based on the same search technology as the google.com Web search.
How does it work?
The Search Appliance builds an index of all University Web pages. It crawls from page to page, branching out by following links on the pages it finds, eventually indexing nearly all of our public Web content. The Search Appliance indexes other types of content as well, including Microsoft® Office files and PDF files.
Currently there are approximately two million searchable documents in the index.
How does the Search Appliance appear in my Web server log?
If your server logs record HTTP User-agent values from your Web visitors,
then you will see entries containing "gsa-crawler"
from the Search Appliance.
The Search Appliance IP address is the address associated with
the DNS name googlewb.oit.umn.edu.
You may also see visits from our failover Search Appliance,
google90.oit.umn.edu,
which crawls to keep its index current so it can be ready
if the primary appliance fails.
What are the benefits over a customized google.com search?
There are several reasons why a Search Appliance makes more sense for the University than to funnel all of our local searches through google.com. Here are a few:
- A local Search Appliance allows us to index content from affiliate websites outside the umn.edu domain, such as gophersports.com.
- Web visitors will get better search results. We can define keyword matches to suggest Web pages that are likely to provide information being sought. For instance, the Twin Cities campus uses the term "residence halls" for on-campus housing, while many people would instead search for "dorms". With a keymatch we could provide a link to Housing & Residential Life above the results for such a search.
- We can filter out unnecessary content. For example, it is not necessary to index both a news article and its "print" version; likewise, we would not want to index blank comment forms for every blog entry because these do not provide meaningful search results.
Who may use the search appliance?
Anyone on the Internet may search for University Web pages using the Search Appliance.
Top-level collegiate and non-academic units within the University may create customized search interfaces to allow searching only within their organizations' Web sites.
Who supports it?
The Search Appliance is supported by Academic & Distributed Computing Services (ADCS), a department in the Office of Information Technology (OIT) at the Twin Cities campus.