Services and Applications
Google Search Appliance

Google is Stanford University’s official search engine. Google represents a significant enhancement to the University’s web environment, providing:

• Better and quicker search results
• Advanced search features, including searching for PDF, .doc and .ppt files, and displaying them as HTML
• Easy and powerful search administration
• Easy integration into web sites

Bringing the Google search appliance into the Stanford infrastructure allows us features that the commercial Google Stanford index cannot duplicate, such as:

• control over our own crawling schedule
  • the on-site search appliance crawls the Stanford web weekly, with a daily incremental index for selected sites
  • the commercial Google service updates its university index approximately monthly
• managing our own KeyMatches (equivalent to the commercial service's "sponsored links"), search term synonyms, and sub-collections
• as FERPA and HIPAA regulations begin to have an effect on the availability of web content (requiring some pages to be access-restricted, for example), the campus search appliance can be authenticated to crawl and index where outside search engines cannot.

ITSS, which supports and manages the University’s central web infrastructure and services, operates and maintains the Google search appliance.

University Communications, which operates and maintains the Stanford home page (http://www.stanford.edu), has implemented the Google search feature on the home and second-level pages of the Stanford web site.

Getting more information

• An announcements mailing list exists for Google users: search-engine-info@lists.stanford.edu.
  If you use the Google search appliance on your Stanford web site, please subscribe to this list for notifications of service changes, updates, etc.
   
• Information and instructions for web creators includes information about:
  • getting your page into the Google index
  • keeping your page out of the Google index
  • adding a Google search feature to your site, plus:
    • advanced parameters
    • subcollections and stylesheets
  • Stanford's configuration of the Google search appliance

• If you have comments or questions about using Google to power the search feature on your website, enter a HelpSU request.

• If you need a page indexed more quickly or frequently than once per week, enter a HelpSU request.

• Slides from the Google Tech Briefing are available online. Check the schedule for upcoming Tech Briefings (or request a new Tech Briefing).

• A newsgroup has been created for Google users: su.computers.search. Post questions or discussions to other Stanford Google users on this newsgroup.