New University Central Search Engine Implementation Begins

Funnelback have been selected as the supplier who will support the replacement of the current Google’s site search. for the University.

The current search engine indexes the full content under all subdomains of ed.ac.uk and other University-affiliated websites, attracting more than 5 million search queries annually. Common search tasks include searching for staff contact details, service information and support, courses and publications.  Funnelback will initially provide a replacement for this and then continue to work with the University to improve the search service that can reach, use, categorise, relate and return all of the content, information and data required to guide University audiences to fulfil their tasks as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

We aim to implement the new search engine during the 2017/18 academic year. The main areas of focus for this project and future enhancements are:

• replacing the current search facility
• facilitating a better search user experience

• exploring how data sources could be integrated into the search data repository
• making extensive use of metadata, taxonomies or other built-in data structures to categorise content from different sources
• including protected content and providing personalised results based on users’ affiliation to the University.

 Further information can be found on the projects website - http://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/uwp016