Implementing a new search engine has been harder than expected. It not only had hardware and software problems but user education has become the largest hurdle.

Replacing the existing CWIS catalog search with a more powerful and faster search mechanism that was scalable for the complete univeristy became the goal. The new search tool will replace the existing CWIS catalog search soon. This will provide for an automated submission to a searchable database of all html pages that are crawled by the new search spider. The spider currently crawls multiple servers across the university. Web servers are included in the crawlers list by permission only. To clarify the new search tool from a users point of view please read the following dialog I had with a typical user these days.

User Question:

I'm not sure what the goal is here, but it looks like a big step backward for our web pages. We have previously made arrangements (using abstracts and keywords) so that our web pages were quickly and easily found by searching for keywords respectively on the health science center home page (CWIS Catalog Search). When I use the new system, these terms yield a huge number of sites most of which are not particularly relevant to these subjects. If our pages are in there, I haven't seem them. If I need to do something to solve this problem, please let me know.

Answer:

If you author web pages within the UT-Houston web site (www.uth.tmc.edu), you need to add additional "Meta Tags" to your web pages for focused searches. The "Meta Tag" template was developed by 'The Resource Discovery Committee" of UT-Houston. This committee . . . . . . . .
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Graphic and Editorial Board
"Web Authors" Brown Bag New Schedule
Web Authors Database 350 to date with 249 on OAC Web servers and the balance on other U.T. servers.

There is an estimated 500 to 600 web authors publishing web pages to the UT-Houston Web sites.