On April 28, 2016, UD's license for the Google Search Appliance expired.
As part of UD's updated Web presence, the University's Office of Communication and Marketing (OCM) has released a new University of Delaware header bar that contains an optional Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). CSE is a free service within Google Apps at UD.
- According to CPA style, the UD-wide CSE should only be used in the new UD banner and headers. The code for the new headers has been released to Web developers in the UD-Branded Header and Footer code repository.
- Search domains included in UD-wide Google CSE
The UD-wide search collection includes all the web pages that match these searches:
- http://www.udel.edu/*
- http://*.udel.edu
- http://udel.onecampus.com/*
- http://www.bluehens.com/*
- http://udmba.com/*
- http://www.udconnection.com/*
...that are not specifically excluded by:
- the search administrator
- a noindex tag in the page's HTML
- password (including webauth) protection
- restricted-access files and/or directories.
- If you had used GSA's KeyMatch feature, you'll want to convert those KeyMatches to CSE promotions.
- You can create a CSE that will search and index websites that match up to 10 search parameters. Creating your own CSE is an ideal solution for creating a search tool for a departmental or college website (or collection of related websites).
How Google CSE works
Google CSE uses the standard Google index. A site is crawled, searched and indexed through Google; the standard Google indexing finds changed, new, and removed pages automatically when it visits UD web sites. Content crawl frequency is dependent on how important Google's algorithm believes a website to be. For instance, pages that Google believes to be important and quickly changing are crawled frequently, while others are crawled less frequently (up to two weeks before being revisited).
Excluding pages from Google's indexing
If you don't want a page to be indexed for search, insert this tag within that page's header information:
<head>
<meta content="noindex, nofollow">
</head>
This code will prevent web crawlers (robots) from indexing the page, and from following any links from the page. If the page has already been indexed, it will be removed from the index the next time Google crawls the page.
Converting KeyMatches to CSE Promotions
If you had been using GSA KeyMatches, you might wish to use CSE promotions, a way to highlight things at the top of a search results page. You can add up to 200 promotions to a Google CSE using the CSE dashboard. (Google CSE Help on Promotions)
If you want to review your list of GSA KeyMatches, contact the IT Support Center.