Search tool for college course web site?

I've done some googling, but failed to find a search tool that meets
my requirements. I'm hoping someone else may know of one. The site
is
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/
and I want to set up customized searches (probably via hidden form
fields) for students in my different courses.

(The Google search itself would be fine, I think, if not for for
requirement #2.)

Requirements:

1. Free

2. Reindex frequently (at least once a week) because new pages are
posted frequently

3. Search designated subparts of site, e.g.
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/math/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat04/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/ti83/...
in a single search that ignores
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/tmii01/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/calc/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat50/...

4. Not server dependent (Why? the College server is an IIS server
and I have no administrative access. I can upload static pages via
ftp and that's it.)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

"Stan Brown" <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> wrote

I've done some googling, but failed to find a search tool that meets
my requirements. I'm hoping someone else may know of one. The site
is
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/
and I want to set up customized searches (probably via hidden form
fields) for students in my different courses.

(The Google search itself would be fine, I think, if not for for
requirement #2.)

<snip requirements>

Usability studies have shown that it is better to have no search utility at
all than to have one that is not extremely powerful (i.e. natural language
support, extensive error-handling capabilities, results ranked by relevance,
etc.)
Perhaps a better solution is to use Google's search as well as organizing
the Information Architecture of the site so that navigation is optimized and
new additions are plainly visible on the front page.


--

Karl Core
http://www.karlcore.com

It seems "Karl Core" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-
design:

Usability studies have shown that it is better to have no search utility at
all than to have one that is not extremely powerful (i.e. natural language
support, extensive error-handling capabilities, results ranked by relevance,
etc.)

That makes sense. I think Google does an awfully good job of
catering for the whole range of searchers from novice to expert. But
it's a WWW-wide index so obviously I can't trigger a reindex on
demand.

Perhaps a better solution is to use Google's search as well as organizing
the Information Architecture of the site so that navigation is optimized and
new additions are plainly visible on the front page.

My problem is that I revise pages frequently during a course, often
as a result of student class questions. That means student searches
would frequently be looking for new or newly changed material. Thus
I can't use Google for searching because it takes too long to update
its indexes. (I think we agree it's unacceptable if a search returns
no results or irrelevant results when the requested information is
actually in the site.)

The first <h2> of each course section's home page is News
which (among other things) highlights new and significantly
changed documents.

As always, I welcome suggestions for improving navigation. A good
sample to look at is
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat04/


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Stan Brown wrote:

I think Google does an awfully good job of
catering for the whole range of searchers from novice to expert. But
it's a WWW-wide index so obviously I can't trigger a reindex on
demand.

My problem is that I revise pages frequently during a course, often
as a result of student class questions. That means student searches
would frequently be looking for new or newly changed material. Thus
I can't use Google for searching because it takes too long to update
its indexes. (I think we agree it's unacceptable if a search returns
no results or irrelevant results when the requested information is
actually in the site.)

I use Atomz ( at <http://search.atomz.com/search/> ) trial account. It
is a free search tool and you can set the day and time for a weekly
update yourself. If you usually put up the largest part of your
information somewhere on wendsday evening, you can set the spidering of
your site to happen at 3 am on thursdays.

Is that any good?

--

Barbara

http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/weblog.html
http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/webontwerp.html

On Sat, 21 Feb 2004 08:53:44 -0500, Stan Brown
<the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> wrote:

I've done some googling, but failed to find a search tool that meets
my requirements. I'm hoping someone else may know of one. The site
is
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/
and I want to set up customized searches (probably via hidden form
fields) for students in my different courses.

Have you tried Atomz? I think that would probably do what you need.

Requirements:

1. Free

Free for smallish sites (can't remember exactly how many pages).

2. Reindex frequently (at least once a week) because new pages are
posted frequently

The free version can be set to reindex once a week on a day of your
choosing.

3. Search designated subparts of site, e.g.
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/math/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat04/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/ti83/...
in a single search that ignores
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/tmii01/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/calc/...
http://www.acad.sunytccc.edu/instruct/sbrown/stat50/...

You mean that some pages are *always* to be ignored? Atomz can do that.
If you need some searches to avoid certain pages and other searches to
avoid different pages, that would be tricky.

4. Not server dependent (Why? the College server is an IIS server
and I have no administrative access. I can upload static pages via
ftp and that's it.)

Atomz uses its own server.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

It seems "Barbara de Zoete" wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design:

I use Atomz ( at <http://search.atomz.com/search/> ) trial account. It
is a free search tool and you can set the day and time for a weekly
update yourself. If you usually put up the largest part of your
information somewhere on wendsday evening, you can set the spidering of
your site to happen at 3 am on thursdays.

Is that any good?

Thanks for the suggestion, Barbara. As it happens, I use Atomz for
my OakRoadSystems.com site.

The reason I can't use it for my college course site is that I need
to have various subdirectories included in a single search. Atomz,
as I understand it, will let you include a hierarchy from a given
subdirectory on down.

The statistics student doing a search needs to see results only from
statistics, TI-83, and general math but not calculus; the calculus
student needs to see from calculus, TI-83, and general math but not
statistics; and so forth. I could set up multiple Atomz accounts but
that bit of shared subdirectories blows Atomz out of the water as
far as I can see.


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

It seems "Stephen Poley" wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design:

You mean that some pages are *always* to be ignored? Atomz can do that.
If you need some searches to avoid certain pages and other searches to
avoid different pages, that would be tricky.

That's the problem.

Students in course A need searches to include directories A, X, Y,
and Z; students in course B need searches to include directories B,
X, Y, and Z. It's those common directories that are the problem.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

http://www.master.com/texis/master/app/apps.html

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown (AT) fastmail (DOT) fm> wrote

It seems "Stephen Poley" wrote in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design:
You mean that some pages are *always* to be ignored? Atomz can do that.
If you need some searches to avoid certain pages and other searches to
avoid different pages, that would be tricky.

That's the problem.

Students in course A need searches to include directories A, X, Y,
and Z; students in course B need searches to include directories B,
X, Y, and Z. It's those common directories that are the problem.

I use FusionBot and with it, using their 'search partitions' feature,
you can customize your search box with drop-down menu options to
restrict the search to specific sections of your site. Each drop down
menu can contain content from multiple directories, with overlap
between them, which sounds exactly like what you are looking for.

They offer a free version for up to 250 pages, and reasonable priced
paid levels:

http://www.fusionbot.com

It seems "TheGuru" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-
design:

I use FusionBot and with it, using their 'search partitions' feature,
you can customize your search box with drop-down menu options to
restrict the search to specific sections of your site.

Thanks for the suggestion. I had not known about Fusionbot before.
It looks interesting, but unfortunately the free package only lets
you reindex twice a month, and materials change a couple times a
week.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/