Search Guide For Web Publishers
A primary way to locate desired Web information is to present queries to a search engine containing indexed Web content. The UTHSC-H uses a Verity Information Server to index and search world-readable HTML documents from most of the university's Web servers in both the uth.tmc.edu and uthouston.edu domains. This index is obtained nightly by a "spider" crawling the UTHSC-H Web servers to find new and updated pages. If you create new pages or make significant changes to existing pages and need these pages to be immediately indexed, you may submit a request for "indexing" to the Office of Academic Computing's Publishing Coordinator.
In addition, UTHSC-H makes available via some of its Web pages the basic "Google" search tool configured to search only content within the uth.tmc.edu security domain. The Google index, unlike the UTHSC-H index is not updated daily and some content may not be updated for as long as 30 days after it is initially published or modified on a UTHSC-H Web server.
Search engines use various factors weighed differently to select content in response to a specific query. These factors include elements such as page title and embedded meta tags like "description", "keywords", "creator", etc. To maximize the probability that a specific query will find the desired content, it is critical that Web content be well labeled and appropriately linked to other pages.
There are two general types of searches
- a basic search query - where one or more word(s) and/or phrase(s) is presented to a search engine, or,
- a focused search - where one or more specific requests are defined and presented as a basis for searching.
Both types of searching benefit from having appropriately labeled documents. The majority of searches are of the "basic" type where a user provides a set of term(s) as input to a search engine and a search is conducted where the weighing of different factors may be unknown or poorly understood by the user. For example, what is the relative importance of search terms being in the title versus being contained in the description versus the number of times they appear within a document?
Focused searches, however, allow a user to explicitly require that certain "search conditions" be met. For example, one may demand that the document must contain specific term(s) in its title, be "created" by Jane Doe, does not contain a certain keyword and was published within a certain date range.
Check Content for Appropriate Meta-Data Labeling
A set of metadata elements is recommended for all content published on UTHSC-H Web servers. It is especially important that the following elements be appropriately created
title
description
keywords
publisher
publisher.component
creator
pagetype (set to "home" if document is a "home page")
One can use the UTHSC-H search engine to specifically check content for appropriate labeling and other critical aspects by using specific "query syntax" to conduct focused queries.