[Sigia-l] Setting up search - IT and IA

[Surla, Stacy]

I'm working with our IT folks and our in-house clients to implement Convera
on one of the government sites we manage.  This is the first time I've been
involved in setting up an in-site search feature, and I'm running into the
most frustrating, bizarrely basic problems.  But I can't yet accept that
this rather expensive product is UNABLE to generate reasonable search
results.  So, if possible, I'd like to converse with people who have gone
through the process of getting search to work well on a site.  I'd explain
the situation here, but it's all too sordid.  Let me just say that I'm
stunned by how much I do not know.  (No, let me say more.  Why can't
metatags be searched and ranked separately from the body of HTML documents?
How can we get the title of a PDF to show up as a title?  I previously
assumed that a search index could be tweaked from the outside, and that
fields could be specified, and that ranking could be described by humans.
If not, then how are controlled vocabularies actually applied?  Is search
really a black box?)

I've not come across very much in articles and list discussions about the
under-the-hood part of making search work. Or I just haven't been able to
see the discussions, being oblivious. Anyway, I'd be very grateful to have
conversations off-list by e-mail, on the phone (my dollar), or via the list
if this topic is of enough interest.

~Stacy Surla