For students roaming the Dartmouth website with mouse clicks of frustration, Computing Services has found a solution, launching a new search engine Friday that promises to make the website more user-friendly.
The new search feature expands index capacity on the search engine from 100,000 to 1 million documents, allowing better-matched search results. The search engine can index more document formats as well, including HTML, XML, text, RTF, PDF and Microsoft Office, among numerous others.
"What the new search engine really does is allow us to ensure that all Dartmouth-related web content that should be indexed can be indexed," said Brian Hughes, associate director for web operations in computing technical services. "This is the biggest piece that was missing from our previous license."
Additional changes to the search mechanism include increased search speed, the result of a new server that has been installed primarily for the search engine processes.
The Dartmouth website has needed a new search engine for the past two years, Hughes said. The number of documents on the Dartmouth website has quickly exceeded the amount of space allocated by the existing search engine license.
"Those constraints forced us to make a lot of really hard choices about what we would allow in the index, which over time led to a badly underpowered and under-represented service," Hughes said.
Computing Services convened a committee, chaired by Director of System Services David Bucciero, with representatives from the library, Public Affairs, the Tuck School of Business and Development and Computing Services. The committee's goal was to find an improved search engine mechanism for Dartmouth's growing website.
According to Hughes, the committee concluded that the College required a new search engine license for its expanding use of the web. Through this renegotiated "perpetual" license, Dartmouth will forge a long-term relationship with Verity, the producers of the Ultraseek search engine used on the College website.
After two rounds of evaluation tests, Ultraseek was chosen over Google's search appliance and NorthernLight's Enterprise search engine, Hughes said.
"Ultraseek was the most mature of all the search engines we evaluated. They offered more flexibility, more fine tuning, better support from the vendor and a deeper feature set," Hughes said. "All of that, combined with better pricing than we were getting from Google, put Ultraseek over the top."
Dartmouth used Altavista until 1999, when Altavista altered the existing search engine and Dartmouth decided to switch to Ultraseek. The combination of features and pricing that Ultraseek offered appealed to Computing Services during the original process and remains important today, Hughes said.
Ultraseek's prices are 40 percent cheaper than the similar Google license, and Ultraseek offered the possibility of further payoffs in the future through a long-term relationship.
