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

[Avi Rappoport]

The variety and options for site search engines are quite stunning, 
there really isn't a single standard that they conform to.  Many of 
them have APIs that people use to override the default settings, I'm 
pretty sure Convera has that somewhere, though it may not be obvious 
at the moment.  Their tech support folks were very nice and helpful 
when I was testing the product.

I have a "Best Practices" presentation online that might help with your issues

<http://www.searchtools.com/slides/bestsearch/index.html>

And I'm always available offline to help my fellow IAs with any 
search engine problems.

Avi

At 5:34 PM -0400 8/27/02, Surla, Stacy wrote:
>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

-- 
Search Server Industry Analysis from Search Tools Consulting
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Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
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