UW-Eau Claire uses a Google search appliance to index collections of UW-Eau Claire pages. We currently have two main collections, which means that all pages on these sites are included in the results set of the UW-Eau Claire search:
- www.uwec.edu
- people.uwec.edu
To ensure that your site makes full use of the capabilities of this and all search engines, you need to understanding how it works. See Designing Pages for Search Engines for more information.
Creating a Subsite Search Function For Your Site
If yours is a public UW-Eau Claire CommonSpot Web site, you have the ability to display a search function on your pages that will allow users to search for content just within your site. Refer to the Creating a Subsite Search handout in the CommonSpot Documentation section for instructions on use.
If your site is small, this option may not make sense. A site map would be more helpful. That's a call for you to make.
Special Functions
The UW-Eau Claire search engine also has some special functions that are helpful in some circumstances:
Quick Links
This feature allows the search engine administrator to associate a term or phrase to a unique web page. For instance, the phrase "mission statement" is associated with the UW-Eau Claire mission statement Web page located on the Academic Affairs web site. When a person searches on the phrase, the page link is displayed under a "Quick Links" heading at the top of the results set.
Thesaurus
The thesaurus is meant to be a look up for similar terms that a user might not know or to anticipate a user who has difficulty spelling. For instance, a user might search on "outreach", an older term for "continuing education", a thesaurus entry could be made by the search engine administrator. At the top of the results page, an option is displayed that reads "Did you mean:" with a checkbox attached to the term "continuing education". If a user checks the box and submits a new search, the results are for "continuing education".
The thesaurus might be used for typos as well. For instance, "registrar" for "registar".
Dictionary
This is primarily a stemming feature. For instance if you would like instances of "catalogue" to result from a search on "catalog", the search engine administrator can add it to the dictionary, if it is not already in the extensive stemming dictionary provided. A user is not notified that results include items other than what was explicitly entered.
If you have suggestions for the use of these functions, please contact the search engine administrator by sending an email message to web@uwec.edu
