Understanding this a wonderful thing, unless you slip into thinking it’s the only type of Google account. This is where I fell into trouble. There’s at least one other: a Google Analytics Account. Your Google Account can give you access to multiple Google Analytics Accounts. And people can share administrative rights to the same Google Analytics Account. Can you blame me for getting confused?

Specifically, I ran afoul setting up Google Analytics for my church. After getting comfortable with it at work, a few months later I set up what I thought was a separate set of analytics for my church. Wrong. In fact I’d set up a “profile” of my work’s account for my church. Church and state. Hmmmm….. But the important point is that profiles are subsets of a Google Analytics account, and if you want to share administrative rights to that account, you share all profiles.

Now it’s a very good idea to share administrative rights to your Google Analytics accounts, assuming the website is not just yours. But could I share this hybrid account with anyone at work or at church? Well, actually I could have. There is one member of my church whom I work with, but I don’t think he would have been happy with this faux solution or with me.

Given that my church had much less data and need for the data, that account was the one to go. What I did was set up a separate account for my church and uploaded the new tracking code. The next day I checked to be sure the second account was working. It was, so I exported a boatload of PDFs from the old account – essentially archiving this data in case we ever need it in the future. And now all is well.

Meanwhile, a picture being worth all of the words above, here is a quick graph of Google Accounts vs. Google Analytics Accounts vs. Google Analytics Profiles. May it prevent you from falling into the same trap.

Vanderbilt’s search engine contract is up for renewal, and rather than rubber-stamping the current solution, the university opted to review four contenders: IBM, Google Search Appliance (GSA), Microsoft Search Engine and Ultraseek. IBM pulled itself out of the running a couple of weeks ago and Microsoft was fraught with technical problems. Just trying to look at it for 10 days in a row, I could never see it — not even once.

Thus the decision came down to Ultraseek, our current search engine, vs. Google Search Appliance. Aside from financial considerations, we based our analyses on three categories.

1. Technical. This encompassed things such as how difficult it was for the IT team to set up and what kind of support they will get if it crashes.

2. Administrative. From the perspective of those who administer the search engine (in particular our university webmaster), we looked at how intuitive the interface was, how much control it gave over the end results, and how it accommodated separate instantiations and templates for large divisions within Vanderbilt that need their own search engine.

3. End User. Most important of all, we assessed the effectiveness of the results. How likely would users be to find what they are looking for?

I don’t have administrative rights to Ultraseek, so I was only able to review it as an end user. Because of this, I won’t be reviewing it, except to say that I have used it as a Vanderbilt webmaster for seven or so years, and have been surprisingly happy with it, particularly how it can be adapted for subsites. The search results, when tuned properly by the administrators, have been decent. I would give it a B overall from an end user perspective. When searched in combination with classic Google using the “site:vanderbilt.edu” string, I can almost always find what I’m looking form. To help end users of the site I administer, I set up an advanced search page that easily allows them to do the same.

Google Search Appliance: The Good and the Not-so-good – or – Even Google Isn’t Perfect

Google Search Appliance (GSA), on the other hand, I was allowed to administer, and thus the majority of this review is an analysis of GSA. It’s a very strong contender to replace Ultraseek.

Jumping to the conclusion and then working backwards, I gave GSA the lowest marks of anyone on the task force. There’s some irony here. I’m a huge Google fan. Google classic has been my search-engine-of-choice since it launched ten years ago. I started using it even before my other librarian friends did. Not only that, I’d been sprinkled by Google Bus fairy dust just this Thursday and was wearing their t-shirt while the task force was in deliberations. But weighing the pros and cons, in the end I judged it to be about equal with Ultraseek. My fellow task force members were notably more enthusiastic than I.

In many ways, it was difficult to compare the two. In particular, Google is more likely to continue improving in the near future, but this is hard to quantify. They’ve made many improvements in the last couple of years, and promise several more soon, giving it a very slight edge. All told I gave it the equivalent of a B+. Here’s a breakdown.

CON

Relevance Rankings. To my surprise, the default order of GSA’s search engine results seems random or worse. I tested using Vanderbilt-based search terms where I’m very familiar with the results on a variety of search engines, internal and external. As best I could tell the GSA results were ranked primarily by their domain names — using the order these domains were crawled. Thus searches for even a cancer term typically listed all vanderbilt.edu results before any vicc.org results. (NB: vicc.org is Vanderbilt’s cancer center, with the most authoritative cancer information at Vanderbilt for patients.)

De-duplications of Pages. Ultraseek natively handles duplicate pages better than GSA. GSA, for example, pulls two versions of the exact same page — the original plus a “larger text” query string. Thus it will show both (1) www.vicc.org/dd/dz/results.php?id=34 and (2) www.vicc.org/dd/dz/results.php?q=textlarger&id=34, where Ultraseek automatically only shows the first. In theory a webmaster can control this with the robots.txt file, but I followed GSA’s instructions for doing this over four days ago, and either the crawler still hasn’t reindexed or the instructions were misleading, because I still see many of these duplicates.

UNKNOWN

Speed. Assessing GSA was particularly challenging since our test was running on older, remote machines. This meant it was much slower. Not only were the results slower than they will be if we purchase GSA, but so was the reindexing. How fast will it be if we buy it? To get a sense, I went to other comparable institutions that have purchased GSA. Yale.edu is a good example. I searched cancer terms there, and they pull up quickly. However, this method only helped for search results. It’s impossible to tell how quickly their sites reindex. And this can be an important issue for a search engine adminstrator, since sometimes you have to get rid of particular results quickly. Having to wait a day, or heaven help us, four days, is simply not acceptable.

Meta-data handling. Another big unknown is GSA’s upcoming improvements to relevance rankings. We were told the next version will allow the administrator to tune results based on meta data. If true, this will help the relevance ranking problems a great deal.

PRO

Number of pages indexed. In just a few weeks, the GSA crawler found 20 million files on vanderbilt servers. Ultraseek only crawls 38,000 files. Presumably some of this reflects Ultraseek’s de-duplication, but the number is so different, it clearly demonstrates that GSA has the potential to find much more. This will be particularly important if we deploy the search engine to our intranets.

Authentication, HIPAA and FERPA. To quote Stanford, another GSA user: “As FERPA and HIPAA regulations begin to have an effect on the availability of web content (requiring some pages to be access-restricted, for example), the campus search appliance can be authenticated to crawl and index where outside search engines cannot.” I’m not sure precisely what this means, but it sounds both significant and promising. From talking to our GSA rep, I believe it signifies that GSA will work well on things like our Medical Center intranets, assuming we have our websites’ authentication set up properly.

The Administrative Interface is intuitive and easy to use. Here is a screen-shot of the home page.

The Documentation and Help Screens for administrators are thorough.

Synonym-handling is much more sophisticated than Ultraseek’s. Out-of-the-box GSA’s search results include “Narrow your search” terms that seem almost magical to me. Search “sarcoma” and it will suggest terms such as “kaposi sarcoma.” Even more wonderous, you can add taxonomies such as the ICD-10 to your search engine.

Results can by customized in many and multiple ways. Results can be grouped in various collections (e.g. a Medical Center collection as well as a University collection), plus webmasters of individual departments can add search boxes to their sites that are restricted to just their URL. For look-and-feel, the results are typically XML using style sheets. Again, you can have different style sheets for different units.

Google caché. Google isn’t just familiar to your average web user. It’s the most trusted brand on the ‘net, and that trust was earned by their search engine. When Vanderbilt users aren’t happy with the current search engine, they will often ask, why aren’t you using Google instead? If we get GSA, we will be — at least in their eyes. The vast majority won’t know or care that the formula we’re using is necessarily different.

That’s it for my analysis of Google Search Appliance. It’s been a blast getting to peek under the hood of a search engine — especially the progeny of the most popular and sophisticated search engine in the world. I certainly hope I can do more of this in the near future. Oh — and did I mention it’s actually — get this — cute? In person, it’s a cheese-like yellow box. I think I want one for me too, but starting at $30,360.95 methinks I can’t afford it. Here’s hoping Vanderbilt can.

And here are a few photos from this leg of their journey.  There weren’t many students around at this point.  Just lots of my geeky friends.  That could be because it was 9:30 in the morning.

Friends Mike, Joe and Melanie. Read more in a blog post by Melanie.

Gill, Keenan and Kate

Friendly Google bus denizen and Kim

Keenan, Gill, Kim and a web diva.

I’m used to geeks, and while there was a healthy sprinkling of them too, the predominant theme was art. At one point they started talking favorite Pantones. I was proud to even know they were talking about color. And many of them can draw! One used to be a courtroom artist. Wow.

Even more amazing, over a one hour lunch they decided to set up both a listserv and blog, and by quitting time today, both were in place. Zoom….

If you are a Vanderbilt employee, you can get to the blog here: Vanderbilt Designers Blog. One challenge it creates: I follow blogs via Google Reader, but it doesn’t support password-protected ones. I’m not sure how it will unfold, but I certainly do admire the pluck of these artists willing to dive right into Web 2.0.

To celebrate this august confluence of events, here are a few street views near-and-dear to my heart.

• My church
• My work (Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center)
• Where Trader Joe’s will be

Step 1. Go to Google News.

Step 2. Scroll down a little and on the right you should see a box something like this:

Step 3. Enter the city, state or zip code of you preferred geographic location

Step 4. The local news will now appear in this section of the main Google News page. Click on its header, which should be a link along the lines of “Nashville, TN, USA.” At this point you could just click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe, but take a minute to fine tune.

Step 5. Scan the stories to see types you aren’t interested in. Me? I’m not too interested in NASCAR.

Step 6. At the top of the page, just to the right of the main search box, is small text reading, “Advanced news search.” Click on that.

Step 7. Note that the result retains your city, state or zip. Go to the “without the words” field and enter the terms you’re not interested in: NASCAR, murder, basketball, whatever…. Press enter, and voila, news without the bits you want to avoid.

Step 8. Now click on the RSS link in the left margin and subscribe to the results in Google Reader. You now have a NASCAR-free news feed.

In the bevy of early articles that came out last week, a point that was made repeatedly is that Google Sites has similarities to Microsoft’s Sharepoint. As Michael Arrington noted in TechCruch, “Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a ‘Microsoft Sharepoint killer.’”

I’m bothered by this language. It’s true that both are web tools for collaboration, and the Apps suite is more directly in MS’s path than Google usually is.  However, having worked quite a bit with Sharepoint in the past, I have to say the two seem worlds apart to me. Sharepoint is based in the old model, where IT is the center of the digital information universe. Sites is based in the new model, where end users are the center of their own digital information universe.  Sharepoint typically costs thousands of dollars to deploy.  Sites is free.  Sharepoint takes a lot to learn.  Sites is a breeze.  And so on.

So to me it feels not so much like a direct blow as an Aikido move, using the momentum of the opponent to one’s own advantage. Sharepoint can get up and lumber on in its own proprietary, IT-centric mode, while the smaller, more agile and crowd-pleasing Google Sites takes a bow.

The best thing about Google Sites is that you don’t have to be a webmaster or IT person to set it up and use it — plus it’s free. Not only that, a web-based collaboration tool hasn’t been readily available to most people before now. I can’t wait to recommend it to some groups I’ve helped build websites for. However, there are other Web users whom I’ll advise to steer clear. It’s not for everyone.

Who Can Make Great Use of Google Sites?

Small Non-Profits. It’s easy to imagine organizations like Gilda’s Club and RASAC building very useful intranets for themselves with Google Sites.

Churches. The observant might have noticed the picture in my first post was of an intranet for my church. To start with, I’m setting up a separate site for each committee that wants one and then tying them together in a central site. I’m particularly excited about rolling it out to our Stewardship Committee, which is knee deep in pie-charts, calendars, newsletter articles and so on. It will be very helpful to have most of this stuff in one easy-to-access place.

Small Businesses. Google has a helpful example of what this might look like.

Who Should Think Twice?

Individuals. This is a tool for collaboration and internal communication. It’s not really meant for an individual’s personal website.

Healthcare. While the sites do use a secure https connection, I couldn’t find any assurance that Google Sites are HIPAA-compliant.

Large business and organizations. I can imagine it working well for larger organizations in time — but not yet. There’s not enough substance or malleability to make it a good choice yet. The potential is enormous, however. I’m looking forward to watching Sites grow.

What is it? And who can best use it for what? Other related questions I couldn’t find answers to included is it yet another Content Management System, will it work for non-techies and is it any good? Eventually it became obvious that I’d just have to try it out. And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend.

30 hours into this, I can see why others have trouble defining it. While the name is “Sites,” it’s not an all-purpose website authoring tool. It’s more of a website niche tool — albeit it a big niche. The niche is using the web for collaboration, particularly for projects and work groups. Google says it’s for easy creation of team websites. For example, it could be a terrific tool for co-authors, an illustrator and editors to use in managing the production of a book. Or a small business could use it as an intranet — making announcements, keeping a general calendar, and gathering boilerplate or template files in one place.

In its current early form it’s set up to do eight things.

1. Share internally. While you can open your site up to the world, it’s designed particularly for people with the same email address to use together. Typically this means a small business email address — not a large organization like vanderbilt.edu and certainly not generic email accounts like comcast.net and gmail.com.

2. Add simple web pages. You don’t have to know HTML to do this. It’s much like adding pages to a blog.

3. Gather related files into a page (called a “file cabinet”). This strikes me as one of Site’s most useful features. It’s easy to imagine ways to gather documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, graphics, and other file formats in one place defined by the project at hand.

4. Integrate announcements into the site. You can have a page of announcements and then display summaries with links on the home page.

5. Add Google Gadgets. The plethora of Google Gadgets available for iGoogle is available to a Google Site too. This opens up lots of possibilities for designing Google Gadgets to use collaboratively.

6. Create lists to track projects.

7. Integrate with other Google Apps. The other “apps” typically include documents, calendar, and chat.

8. Search the site the way only Google can do.

Technically, the software used to write this was a Wiki. But thank heavens they don’t intimidate people by saying that anywhere in Google documentation. Even better, it doesn’t use any of those peculiar Wiki markups. So in my opinion it’s not a Wiki, even if it once was.

You might have noticed I haven’t answered all of my own questions yet. I will do that in upcoming posts, as I continue to pick apart the who, what, how and why of Google Sites.

My reasons were:

1. Better spam filtering. Gmail puts what it guesses is junk in a folder you can easily review.
2. IMAP is an option. This is particularly helpful if you have an iPhone or similar device. A POP account that you look at on both your computer and your iPhone is a big pain, since you have to touch everything twice.
3. No need to backup. I suppose if you have super-important email you might want to back up even Gmail. It is fallible, but it’s nothing compared to the fallibility of email archives on an aging hard drive.
4. Great search engine. Combining Google search know-how and email is to die for.
5. Multiple email accounts. I still get my Comcast email. It’s just coming into Gmail. You can set Gmail up to fetch up to five POP email accounts. In fact you can set it so it replies from the same email address.

All in all, this is the easiest email migration I’ve ever done. And I’m getting my friend’s poetry again.