Transcript PRESENT: NINA KULHAWY HANS DEBANO This transcript produced from audio recorded by Nina, Kulhawy, Arizona State University's Research and Academic Affairs Communication team. NINA KULHAWY: Welcome to the Arizona State University's Research and Academic Affairs Communication podcast. My name is Nina Kulhawy. The web is vast and unending, like a giant boundless mall. Like the mall, there are times when I want to meander through the web, and there are times I want to find exactly what I'm looking for and get out. So what kind of tool do we need to help the user find their way? I'm here with Hans DeBano, self-proclaimed ASU Findability Engineer, to talk about our Google Search Appliance. Hello Hans! HANS DEBANO: Hi Nina! NINA KULHAWY: What is findability, and why is it important? HANS DEBANO: Well, I know you're kidding about my job title, but wouldn't it rock to be a "findability engineer"? NINA KULHAWY: That is exactly what I was thinking HANS DEBANO: It's something I picked up from a book that came out. It's called "Ambient Findability". It's by Peter Morville and I really recommend the book. I can't do it justice here, but findability includes how successfully you can locate and discover objects on the web. And the degree to which a web site might support navigation and retrieval of content. Morville gives a lot of concrete examples in his book based on his experience with the National Cancer Institute and other organizations. He also delves into the business value of findability. Obviously you know, as a consumer, you can't buy the things you can't find, but even if you're the National Cancer Institute and your mission includes disseminating cancer information to people in need, the findability of your web content is still crucial. My personal interest falls more into applications in higher education. By the way, another key message I got from the book is the importance of getting people to your web site, and that would be the ASU web site in this case. If you can't do that, then all the nice tools you have at the ASU web site won't make a difference. NINA KULHAWY: Most of us are familiar with using Google to search on the web. I don't understand what the Appliance offers that's different. HANS DEBANO: Well, Google comes in a lot of different flavors. I guess like Baskin Robbins. If you were to go to the Google web site and do a search, or if you'd installed the Google toolbar in your browser and you do a search with that, you're basically searching the entire internet for results. And you're able to do that because, either days or months before, Google has had its computers visiting your web site and crawling like a spider through the content on those sites. NINA KULHAWY: So there's this free search from Google that millions of people use. How's this connected to a search that I use from the ASU web site? Say on the home page? HANS DEBANO: The ASU home page currently uses Google's free university search service. And our plan is to replace that with the use of the Appliance. The Appliance just has lots more to offer. NINA KULHAWY: So, you mentioned that the Appliance is not yet being used on the ASU home page. How can I try it out? HANS DEBANO: Well, the easiest way is to bring up the page asu.edu/search in your web browser. And there's a clearly marked form there for searching the Appliance. It's the first form on the page. NINA KULHAWY: So, if I am a dean of a school or the director of a center…why should I be excited about this Appliance? HANS DEBANO: One great advantage of the Appliance is that it lets us define these arbitrary searchable "collections" of web servers and URLs. In the "old days", virtually all of ASU's web content lived on asu.edu web servers. So, it was sufficient to index and search the asu.edu domain. And if you did that, you'd have covered, oh, 99 percent of the ASU web content. Well, that's changed quite a bit recently. We've got new corporate partnerships and growing relationships with our community, so we see ASU content on .org and even .com servers as well as asu.edu. NINA KULHAWY: So say a "research collection" could include researchmag.asu.edu and asutechnopolis.org then? HANS DEBANO: Yes, and so you could configure the ASU Google search for "biodesign", say, to return only the results in that research collection. Or to take another example, ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences they have in the neighborhood of 30 web servers for their various schools, departments and centers. And all those different addresses can comprise a single searchable CLAS collection. NINA KULHAWY: I am intrigued…what else ya got? HANS DEBANO: I've got lots more. The Appliance also allows colleges and other units to customize the appearance of the searches done in their areas of the web. For example, the ASU libraries web site search now uses the Appliance, and they've customized their search results to display a libraries-specific look. Tempe campus Information Technology has done the same thing for their search results. The Appliance allows for the use of what Google calls "keymatches" and "synonyms". NINA KULHAWY: I love a good synonym roll, all warm and gooey... HANS DEBANO: Uh huh. A synonym it's actually pretty straightforward. I know you're joking. But, it allows you to setup these alternate search suggestions. So when someone searches for "computer account", for example, the search results would show "you could also search for 'asurite userid'". It's a neat way to translate between the words that others who aren't familiar with us and our own local ASU vocabulary. NINA KULHAWY: Well, I've heard of keymatches. That allows you to bring certain addresses or web sites to the top of the search results. Don't the correct search results usually percolate to the top of the results anyway? Why would we need to force that? HANS DEBANO: It sounds like we have a food theme going here. NINA KULHAWY: We do. We're obsessed. HANS DEBANO: Well, without a keymatch, Google uses its own internal process to establish a page's relevance, and then it orders the search results by the page relevance. When you've defined keymatches, those particular links, those keymatches, appear at the very top of the search results and then page relevance is used for the remaining results. NINA KULHAWY: Give me an example HANS DEBANO: OK. Say you're a student and it's that time of the semester where final exams are coming up. And you'd like to find the final exam for your courses. Well, go ahead and try an experiment. Try a search for "finals" on the current ASU home page. Does that schedule come up first in the search results? NINA KULHAWY: I don't know. And maybe people at home can try it. But I'll take your word for it. HANS DEBANO: And it doesn't of course. And there are various technical reasons why it may not and that could probably make for a whole other podcast. But if instead you went to the Appliance and searched for "finals", the very first result would be a link to the "ASU Final Exam Schedule". NINA KULHAWY: Well, that's exciting. But doesn't that leave room for conflict? I mean, who decides what keymatches and synonyms will be used for ASU searches? HANS DEBANO: The Appliance allows for us to display up to three keymatches. So an Appliance search for "research", for example, it could turn up three separate important research links. And in case you're wondering, right now we've only got two. NINA KULHAWY: Well, do the keymatches and synonyms only apply to ASU searches as a whole? Or could a particular college come up with their own set that's more specific or useful to them? HANS DEBANO: That's another advantage of the Appliance. In addition to the overall set of ASU enterprise keymatches and synonyms, you can also have those that are associated with particular local units. I'd mentioned the ASU Libraries customized search results earlier. In addition, the library could setup these keymatches and synonyms that were specific to just their searchers. Those search terms might not apply as readily to ASU as a whole. NINA KULHAWY: I know you've had dialog with ASU technical staff regarding the Appliance. Are you planning to discuss it with other audiences as well? HANS DEBANO: That's part of what I hope this podcast accomplishes. It's a mechanism we can use to get news about the Appliance out to more people. I think another fruitful approach will be if I can present about the Appliance to communication professionals at the university. They're probably more likely to want to milk the strategic advantages of the appliance. NINA KULHAWY: What about colleges and administrative areas that want to use the Appliance for their local search? HANS DEBANO: Well, that's something they can do now, without waiting for the main ASU pages to utilize the search. I'd encourage those people to contact me and I'd be happy to work with them. We do require the web servers that will be indexed by the Appliance to pass security scans. Information Technology has a scanning program that assesses the security of a web server and, if the server passes, I can go ahead and configure the Appliance to index their web site. If the web site is hosted on asu.edu, that server, then there's no need to wait on this because the server has already passed the security scan and is being continuously monitored. NINA KULHAWY: The benefits of the Appliance seem to apply only to within ASU searches. Is that correct? HANS DEBANO: That's true. In the larger scheme of things we need to balance out the use of the Appliance with methods that will bring people to the ASU web site *initially*. And that brings us right back to the beginning when we talked about the overall findability issues. NINA KULHAWY: What are the plans to replace the existing free search with the Appliance search? HANS DEBANO: We're going to start that replacement process this month, January 2006. And we're going to start rather visibly by replacing the default search that you get on the ASU home page. NINA KULHAWY: If people are interested in more information on the Appliance, or have questions for you, Hans, how will they get in touch with you? HANS DEBANO: There'll be an info web page that comes with this podcast and that contact information will be there. NINA KULHAWY: Great, well thanks so much for talking with me. HANS DEBANO: Thanks, Nina. I appreciate it.