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.

If you’re a web standards fan, I’m sure this isn’t news. But if you are like most of the rest of the world, you’re probably saying, “So what?”

Good question. Standards are the bedrock of the web, and while it would be erroneous to say Microsoft played fast and loose with them, they were notoriously sluggish about improving IE and bringing it into compliance. They had almost total market domination with IE6 for five years. During that time IE’s lack of standards compliance slipped from being a minor headache for web developers to a major crisis.

The crisis peaked when Microsoft finally released a new version — IE7 — and jillions of websites broke. At Vanderbilt, IE7 didn’t just cause cosmetic problems; it broke some mission-critical hospital applications. Because of this many IT departments around campus have blocked deployment of IE7. I expect we’re far from alone. The irony is that the problem was IE7 being more standards compliant than IE8. But it still wasn’t as compliant as any of the other major web browsers.

It’s been an enormous e-pickle. To their credit, Microsoft took ownership of the problem, scrambling to come up with something better. The result is IE8.

Should you rush right out and download IE8? I’d advise holding off, because it will overwrite whatever version of IE is currently on your PC. However, if you’re responsible for websites, you should get it soon. The good news is it should be able to toggle into IE7 mode. As soon as it’s a bit more stable I’ll be updating the PC I run IE7 on, testing IE8 and reporting back.

And what a handsome page it is. The University Web Communications team has done an excellent job. It’s not your usual blah gray or blue mobile site. While maintaining the minimalist style best suited to an iPhone, it manages to look very Vanderbilt — black with touches of gold and dark red.

As well as the home page and admissions, the top layers of the news, calendar, athletics, and several other sections have been optimized, and I expect more will come soon. It’s a great start and a very pleasant surprise.

For those who might need it or are learning how to use strtok, here are the gory details.

// Start phone number expansion
if ($row['telephone'] != "") {
$phone = $row['telephone'];
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
switch ($phonestart) {
case '2':
$phone = '32' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
case '3':
$phone = '34' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
case '6':
$phone = '93' . $phone;
$phonestart = strtok($phone, "-");
break;
default:
break;
}
if ($phonestart != '615') {
$phone = '615-' . $phone;
}
echo $phone;
}
// End phone number expansion

Friday I’ll be doing a presentation using my favorite simple, but elegant, presentation application. It’s Eric Meyer’s Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System (AKA S5). I happened across it a few years ago and have used it ever since.

What I love about S5 is that it’s mostly one HTML file which tidily holds all of your links, graphics, etc. If you’re going to be showing webby things, why not use a webby tool? Best of all its look-and-feel is powered by CSS, so customizing it is a breeze for those of us who design web pages day in and day out.

For those who don’t and work for Vanderbilt Medical Center, here’s a zip file to download and a quick demo. To go through the demo, just hit the space bar or arrow keys a few times.

1. Send in a form request to ITS to set up a new database. This is likely to take a day or two. Once it’s set up, hang onto the connections strings and….
2. Download Drupal (version 5.6 in this case).
3. Unzip and move the contents to the correct directory on your computer.
4. Read the install.txt.
5. SFTP all of the files to the server. (I use Dreamweaver for this).
6. Change the permissions (temporarily!) to the file /sites/default/settings.php, so the server can write to it. I do this using CyberDuck.
7. Manually add a “files” directory and set permissions on it so that it can be written to.
8. Point your browser to the base url of your soon-to-be Drupal website. At this point you should see the setup screen. As well as filling out the required fields, click on “Advanced’ near the bottom of the page, and then replace “localhost” with the host ITS supplies.
9. Voila! Drupal should appear. There are just a few minor housecleaning items left.
10. Change the permissions back on the settings file you altered in step 6.
11. Go to the status report (in admin/logs/status) and see if there are any problems. You’ll see immediately if there are. Probably “Cron maintenance tasks” is highlighted. Just run it manually for now.
12. Chances are you’ll want cron to work automatically in the future. ITS has to do this for you. (They don’t allow SSH.) Email ITS Partner (its-partner@vanderbilt.edu) and tell them you need a cron job that looks something like “0 * * * * wget -O – -q -t 1 http://exampledrumpalsite.vanderbilt.edu/cron.php” — replacing “exampledrumpalsite.vanderbilt.edu” with your own drupal URL. This example would run your cron every hour on the hour. If you don’t need it that often, tell ITS.

That’s it. Now go forth and build a fabulous Drupal site for VU.

There are simple instructions on how to do this for your own website on Dan Dickinson’s blog. The one catch is your site has to be in the root folder. If it’s in a subdirectory (e.g. vanderbilt.edu/mydepartment/), it doesn’t work. If you do have access to the root folder, it boils down to creating a 57 x 57 pixel PNG image, naming it “apple-touch-icon.png” and saving it in said root. That’s it.

For Vanderbilt Med Center web developers, here’s an image I created that you can download and adapt for your VMC site. If you use the PSD file, it’s incredibly simple to change the background color so it matches your site.

• A Photoshop (PSD) file
• A PNG file

[Thanks to colleague Chris for letting me know that this won't work for non-root folders.]

In WordPress, the file you have to update is wp-db.php in the wp-includes includes folder. As of today it’s found on line 69. Find the line that reads:

$this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword);

Replace it with:

$this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword, true, MYSQL_CLIENT_SSL);

That’s all there is to it.

But as long as I’m blogging about this, I thought I’d give those of you having to upgrade WordPress my list of things to do. (I wrote it down so I don’t have to rethink it with every upgrade.)

Upgrading WordPress With a Secured MySQL Server

1. Download and unzip the latest upgrade.
2. Rename your current blog folder (local side) something like blog.old. Put the newly downloaded and unpacked folder in its place (being sure to rename it as needed).
3. Review the readme file. Assuming upgrade instructions are the same as always, in the new folder….
4. Copy your old wp-config.php
5. Copy your old wp-content/plugins
6. Copy your old wp-content/themes/
7. Edit wp-includes/wp-db.php (see above)
8. Continue following the readme instructions, which usually means uploading the new files and pointing your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php

One last step: thank Vanderbilt ITS for their help and support with this kind of work. They rock.