Phil Baker summarizes the meeting outcomes as:

Here’s a sampler of the ideas turned up during the day:
* continue to build the resources with background information that I gathered for the meeting.
* promote the use common survey tools, for example the online tool used by David Davies for the MeDeV subject centre (results here).
* textual analysis of metadata records to show what is being described in what terms.
* sharing search log in a common format so that they can be analysed by others (echoes here of Dave Pattern’s sharing of library usage data and subsequent work on business intelligence that can be extracted from it).
* analysis of search logs to show which queries yield zero hits which would identify topics on which there was unmet demand.

Phil has another post on “Analysing OCWSEarch logs” that is also interesting.

MIT’s OCW implementation uses MIT’s Google Search Appliance to support searching the OCW site.  This Development Note discusses customizing this search mechanism to provide richer, more useful results.

Background

MIT’s OCW site contains static content.  Unlike dynamic web sites where content can be assembled into a page on demand, each page at http://ocw.mit.edu exists fully formed waiting to be served.  While this approach has advantages, it limits the ability of users to query specific results.  The reason is that Google is simply looking for words; it doesn’t attribute any semantic meaning to these words.  For the query “Marx”, Google depends on the user submitting the query to distinguish between Groucho and Karl.

Objective

Use of MIT’s Google Search Appliance yields multiple benefits.  The primary benefit is that it leverages the current solution to return a richer query result set.  MIT’s OCW has very high standards for stability, scalability, and conventionality.  A solution that used its current solution would make it more attractive for future adoption.  Another benefit is the power of the Google search algorithms.  After all, “Google” is synonymous with online searching.

Technique

Customization is achieved by writing a XSL stylesheet that changes the results page from the familiar Google results page format to a layout of your choice.

The query string sent to the server when executing a search from the Greenfield site looks like this:

http://search.mit.edu/search__EVENTTARGET=&__EVENTARGUMENT=&
site=ocw&client=mit&getfields=*&output=xml_no_dtd&
proxystylesheet=%2Foeit%2FOcwWeb%2Fsearch%2Fgoogle-ocw.xsl&
proxyreload=1&as_dt=i&oe=utf8&departmentName=web&
courseName=&q=grandmother&btnG.x=11&btnG.y=7

Which breaks down this way:

Resources

[1] Google’s Search Protocol Reference documents how queries are submitted and results returned from the Google Search Appliance.

[2] MIT’s guide to Google Stylesheets