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Intelligence
Lost in Dot-EDU: Why the search function on college sites fails

Intelligence

Lost in Dot-EDU: Why the search function on college sites fails

Jul 27, 2005By Michael Stoner

By Cara Little

[Cara Little is a developer at Global-Image, mStoner’s sister company, which provides a broad range of strategic technical services.]

Pity the poor search-dominant user. Like 50 percent of the visitors who come to your college or university site, she ignores the links on your home page and heads directly for the search box. And 85 percent of the time, she’s disappointed. That’s how often, on average, site searches fail to return usable results.

Why, and what can you do about it? First, the whys:

1. Poor planning:: Most websites publish their content, set up a search engine to index the content, and launch the site. Providing an effective search is something of an afterthought in the web development process. As a tool, it is not necessarily integrated into the site.

2. Inconsistent and nonexistent keywords: In order for search to work well, web content must be well-tagged (or labeled) and it must be organized. Untagged or poorly tagged content undermines the ability of the search engine to index this content. Inconsistent use of keywords and disorganization within the content lead to sketchy and unreliable search results.

3. Poor search user interfaces: Poorly designed interfaces increase frustration levels. Too many options for the initial search can be overwhelming and results pages can be even worse.

4. Ill-equipped search engines: Out of the box, most search engines are configured to spider the standard content on one web server. For an environment where the content is scattered across multiple servers, these search engines will be unable to index all of the content. In addition, a site may have content stored in various file formats—Word, PDF, HTML, PowerPoint, Excel. Content may also be stored within a database.

How do you make an effective search?

Here’s a summary of the key steps:

1. Develop standard content categories and properly tag all content. A full analysis of the information on the site will help you define a list of hierarchical categories, or taxonomy, which can be used to classify the content. Each page within the site should then be tagged with the pre-defined categories.

2. Update your search user interface. Redevelop the interface to enable users to perform a quick search from anywhere within the site. Also important: make results scannable; ensure that results are sorted by relevance; eliminate unnecessary information; offer a “best bets” feature.

3. Determine the search engine configuration. Choose a search engine that meets the needs of your environment—particularly with regards to the number of servers involved. In addition, the search engine should be set up to re-index the content of the website on a regular basis.

4. Run reports. In order to close the loop on search solutions, administrators should be able to evaluate the performance of the search solution.

With these and other improvements, your website will be ready for the search-dominant user—whether she’s planning to apply, check up on her grades, or donate untold millions. For a more complete discussion, read Global-Image’s white paper, “Improving Search on College Websites.”


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?