Three specific search options are presented below. The FrontPage
option will search your Web site only. The second option allows you
to set up a search (within a page of an Indiana University Web site)
of one or more of the many Indiana University Web sites. The Google
option can be used to set up, free of charge, a search (within a
page of any Web site at any university) of a single Web site at any
university.
The only possible reason why anyone
with access to one of the two other search options discussed below
would want to choose the FrontPage Search feature (which you
implement by using Insert - Web Component - Web Search) is
that changes in your Web site will show up right away in the search.
But this advantage is more than offset by the lack of advanced
search features and the omission of PDF and Microsoft Office files
from the search. Also, keep in mind that for this search to work,
the Web server where your Web site is located must be equipped with
FrontPage Server Extensions. Try it below, you probably won’t like
it.
FrontPage search of this Web
site The search results will show up below and not on a separate
page.
If your Web site resides on a Web server within the
Indiana University network, you can easily install a search feature that
uses the Inktomi search engine of Indiana University Web Services. Inktomi scans not only HTML files
but also PDF files and MS Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). See the I. U. Webmaster’s instructions, which will link you to a
page that will create the HTML that you can paste within your Web page.
You can set up a search of your I. U. Web site or of any other one or
more I. U. Web sites. You should be aware of threefairly
harmless limitations of this search
engine. First, there must be a link to all the Web site(s) that
you intend to place in your search option in at least one Indiana
University Web page that is already being indexed by the I. U. Inktomi
“spider”. Second, the Inktomi “spider” may take as long as a month to refresh the indexes for
those sites. Third, the sum of the characters of the URLs of all
the sites must not exceed about 400 characters. Below, I have set up a search of the main Web site of the
Department of Chemistry at Indiana University-Bloomington (IUB-CHEM)
plus all other Web sites that originate within IUB-CHEM, but I have not
included individual faculty Web sites such as
avogadro.chem.indiana.edu and www.indiana.edu/~avogadro,
because the eleven URLs that I have included already add up to
about 340 characters. A search of the twenty (as of 6/30/01) IUB-CHEM
individual faculty Web sites would have to be setup as two searches. A
search of
www.indiana.edu will include these sites.
If Web services at your
university do not provide a search engine option, try the
Google search service for individual Web sites available
free of charge to universities. Register for this service at
http://services.google.com/googleuniv/login.
You will be guided through a simple process that will create
a small piece of HTML code for insertion on your Web site.
You will also be given the option of having a header (stuff
you wish to show above the search results) and a footer
(stuff under the search results). I created the header and
footer in FrontPage, and then pasted the resulting HTML code
in boxes of the Google Search Customizations page. The
header and footer information resides at Google and not on
your Web server. You can go back and make changes at any
time. These changes get implemented within two hours or
less, but keep in mind that the Google search-engine
“spider” may take as long as a month to start indexing your
site, and then as long as a month to refresh the index. Here
I have set up a Google search of the Web site of
Instructional Support Services at Indiana University.
Google search of the Web
site of
Indiana University Instructional Support Services (ISS)
Items that were placed on
the ISS Web site more recently than a month ago may not show up yet.
