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Tips on Google Search in the CityU Web

by Helium Hung
 
The CityU Search was powered by the public Google Search (a service hosted by Google) since 2005. After Google announced the availability of their enterprise solution for Asia-Pacific region in late 2009, the Google Search was replaced by the Google Search Appliance (a CityU locally hosted service) in Sep 2010. This locally hosted search engine provides end users with instant results on the most current web pages stored in all web sites within the cityu.edu.hk domain that are chainable from the CityU Homepage. Moreover, students and staff are able to search the CityU Intranet for information that they are eligible to read according to their roles. These functions are neither fully featured nor supported by the earlier Google search engine.
 
In general, users can search information in all CityU web sites via the CityU Homepage by entering the search string in the Search box at the top of the page (www.cityu.edu.hk). Users can also go to the search page directly by clicking the
icon or via the URL http://search.cityu.edu.hk
 


By default, the search results page will show all the related information that is available for viewing by the public only.
 


Some useful tips for students and staff are listed below:
 
1.  Search the CityU intranet
 
You can search for CityU protected information that you are eligible to read by selecting "Intranet + Public (user authentication required)" on the search page.
 


You will be asked for your CityU EID and password.
 


The search results will include the web pages/files that you have the permission to access.
 
2.  Search information of a specific department
 
You can narrow the search results and select to show only the web pages/files of a specific department by selecting the desired department from the drop-down list.
 
Example: Selecting the EDGE department will narrow down the web pages belonging to EDGE only.
 


3.  Search for a file type
 
You can search for pages with a specific file extension by adding 'filetype:xxx' after the search string, whereby the search results will only show the targetted file type that contains the searched string.
 
Example:
filetype:pdf – returns only files with a pdf extension
 


4.  Narrow your search
 
If you find the search result sets are too large to handle, you can further narrow your search by selecting from the suggested search strings provided by the Google engine on the right-hand side of the search page.
 


5.  What if the search returns no results
 
If there are no search results, the search engine would say "Do you mean:….", and provide some pre-defined keywords that may be related to your search string which are helpful in correcting typos, and choice of terminologies.
 
Example: "fast printing service" is a pre-defined keyword for "fastprint"
 
Other Related Query Examples:
 
Pre-define keyword
Search string
fast printing service
notebook fastprint
fastprint notebook
academic calendar
canlender
calander
Young Chung-Yee Health Centre
clinic
medical centre
 
 
6.  Advanced search
 
The CityU search provides many advanced search options (Language, File format, Occurrences, etc.). The "Advanced Search" link can be found at the top right-hand corner of the CityU Search page.
 
For details on the search options, please refer to http://search.cityu.edu.hk/user_help.html
 


Some useful tips for department web masters / administrators are shown below:
 

1.    Cannot find the Departmental/Project Website in the search results

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) does not crawl departmental / project websites that are not chained from the CityU homepage and therefore would exclude them from the search results. If you would like your website to be crawled by the GSA, please raise a CSC work request to add your departmental / project website to the GSA crawling list. In doing so, your website will be included in the search results after 24 hours.

2.    JavaScript websites redirection

The GSA does not support crawling on JavaScript website redirection.  If you are using JavaScript to redirect users to web pages according to user's selection, the GSA is unable to include these web pages for searching.  In this case, you are suggested to create a sitemap for your departmental websites so that the GSA can crawl and index those pages through the sitemap (Sample sitemaps can be found in CityU homepage and CSC homepage.)

3.    Too many crawling sessions from the GSA

If you observe that the GSA (search.cityu.edu.hk, 144.214.6.245), using the normal setting of concurrent sessions when crawling your departmental web server, has affected the performance of your web server, please raise a CSC work request to report the issue.

The CSC can configure the GSA to reduce the average number of concurrent connections opened to your web server for crawling to further minimize the web server performance impact. Your server loading for handling the crawling can then be significantly relieved.