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Challenge |
Overview
The University of Florida (UF) is a public research university in Gainesville, Florida. Founded in 1853, UF is Florida's largest and oldest educational institution and is among the nation's most academically comprehensive public universities, with programs in fields ranging from agriculture to law.
Providing fast and accurate access to relevant information is a key part of the university's mission. For the more than 58,000 students, faculty, and staff who study, work, and share ideas at UF, it's also essential to academic and professional success.
The Challenge
University of Florida Web Administrator Mark Trammell needed a search service that could handle the large volume of searches on the UF system — nearly 12,000 a day during the busiest periods — while dealing gracefully with the university's highly distributed, technologically diverse IT infrastructure. The UF web servers provide access to approximately 300,000 documents spread across hundreds of machines throughout the state of Florida, from web pages and PDFs to Microsoft Office documents.
UF's first requirement was to make research materials available quickly and easily to students in diverse fields without making them navigate the university's vast and complex network. "In one building, someone might be studying architecture," Trammell explains. "And in the next building, fine arts, computer science, business, or food and agriculture sciences. Our mission is to quickly get people to the research information they're trying to find." UF also needed a reliable, easily managed internal search solution to satisfy administrative needs. As Trammell points out, "It's also our duty to give the students the regular curricular information they need to determine their schedules and sign up for classes."
For reasons that range from guarding individual privacy to protecting intellectual property, UF wanted a completely internal search solution. "We wanted more control. We didn't want someone to type a search query into a UF search engine and have that query handled somewhere else. And we wanted the ability to provide subcollections to certain departmental units."
Finally, UF's environment required a platform-independent solution that could crawl the entire network seamlessly and deliver search results in a standards-based, highly customizable format.
"Computing on campus is very distributed," Trammell explains. "Many departments have their own networks with their own separate data stores." The individual departments on the sprawling Gainesville campus are connected by Gigabit Ethernet over the university's core network, with statewide satellite offices hooked in over the Internet through the 700 Megabit pipe that feeds the campus intranet.
While the university web servers run on a cluster of IBM AIX machines, the departmental networks run a wide variety of operating systems. "Computer science departments are heavily Unix-based, while fine arts departments tend to be Mac-oriented. But there can be five or six different operating systems running in a single department — everything from Windows 2000 and NT to Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X." There are also administrative complexities. "We have webmasters at the university, college, and departmental levels of our domain hierarchy. On top of that, many professors are running their own web servers." And not everything is in Gainesville, Trammell noted. "We have offices in every county in the state of Florida, many with their own servers. And all of them certainly want their content crawled."
The Solution
UF deployed Google's GB-1001 to simplify search for students, faculty, and staff.
"We took the Google Search Appliance and our previous solution and plugged the top 100 searches from the UF home page into both to see who gave us the most relevant results," says Trammell. "Hands down, Google beat the solution we used before."
"It was very easy to set up," Trammell notes. "The administrative interface is incredibly intuitive. You don't have to understand the OS to run the Google interface."
The Google Search Appliance crawls the entire UF network seamlessly, no matter what platform a particular server is running. And because the Google Search Appliance is standards-based, it's easy to tailor search results to the broad variety of requirements and interfaces at UF's many colleges and departments. "A college-level webmaster might tell me, 'I only want to search our unit, and then deliver the results in our look-and-feel.' With the Google Search Appliance, I can say, 'That's fine — just grab the XML and fold, spindle, and mutilate it as you like."
End Result
Whether for research or for personal use, UF students and personnel now get the exact data that they need. "Our goal was to give users the most relevant results as quickly as we could. Google was the way to do that," says Trammell. "I do a lot of speaking around the university, and the response to Google is overwhelmingly positive. With the Google Search Appliance, a person doesn't have to understand the hierarchical structure of the University to find the information they're looking for."
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies, the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications, and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units.
Contact sales for more information.
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