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Google: Not just a search engine anymore

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As the google.com search engine appears on an increasing number of university web sites across the country, many colleges have decided to use Google traffic reports to their advantage.

A Google search of a university web site begins when a person types in a word or phrase to find within the university’s site. For colleges registered with Google’s new tracking software, the sought-after word or phrase is saved and relayed back to the college. This information allows subscribing universities to see what people are searching for on their sites.

Nick Weaver, Director of Online Services at the University of Wisconsin, thinks Google’s new service allows easier access to a wider variety of important information.

“I think monitoring what people are searching for is very valuable,” Weaver said. “It allows us to figure out what’s on people’s minds.”

Along with a free version of tracking software, Google also offers a more personalized web service. For a fee of $28,000, Google provides a two-year license on hardware and software that can be tailored to each university. Some benefits of a paid Google search report are daily system updates of a university’s server and more prompt indexing of sites.

Communications Manager for the UW Department of Information Technologies Brian Rust feels that there is a major difference in benefits between Google’s paid and free services.

“The free service isn’t nearly as responsive. [Universities] can either pay Google a lot of money, or rely on them to do it for free,” Rust said. “The problem with the free service is that if a university updates a page on the web, [the web site] won’t show up in Google for months.”

While schools like Pacific University have made changes to their web sites after analyzing Google’s search reports, some universities are not ready to give Google reports top priority just yet.

“The Google search is in addition to the WiscINFO directory, which is an index of university sites comprised of sites submitted by people around campus,” Weaver said. “Google is built upon a full-text spidering of the wisc.edu domain, while the WiscINFO is built upon a database of records about sites around campus. The benefit of the Google engine is its comprehensiveness, but WiscINFO provides more targeted results.”

While the UW web site has been using the Google search engine for nearly five years, the UW DoIt Center is currently fueled by the search engine Inktomi. The WiscINFO directory was also recently rewritten using the Inktomi engine. Weaver is currently evaluating which search engine works more effectively.

“There are other ways [than Google] to program a site to find out what people are searching for,” Weaver said. “[UW’s site] may be built around Inktomi, but I’ve found Google to work really well.”

UW is currently registered with Google to receive search reports of the university’s site free of charge. Though there have been no changes to the UW web site to include Google yet, Weaver hopes to update the UW web site in the coming months. “After Thanksgiving, I plan to sit down and reshape the site,” Weaver said. “[Reshaping the site] could involve the use of Google’s reports.”