Web. Orange you glad we’re doing a refresh?

One thing that has come up on this blog, are people’s feelings about the search engine. This reminded me of an incident I encountered recently, that I thought I would relate here.

A user contacted College Relations about their site, which wasn’t showing up in the search results. “Surely,” thought the user, “the search engine must be broken, right?”. I can understand this line of thinking, if only because I think the same thing sometimes. Search, as a tool, has gotten so much better, and become so pervasive to our computing lives (like Mark’s example in his linked comment, above), that when it doesn’t work, one assumes the fault lies in the search engine.

This is not always the case.

A search engine is only as good as the content that feeds it. Oh sure, there can be poor search engines. In fact, there have been several search engines at Buffalo State, with the first (circa 2001-2002) being particularly unhelpful. Now, however, we use the Google Mini. This follows the same search methods as Google—you know, http://www.google.com/. So where was the user’s site?

As I said, it’s about content. Part of the content is having people link to your site. The user’s site didn’t show up, because there were no links to it anywhere on the Buffalo State Web site. If there are no links to your Web site, then the search engine isn’t going to be able to find it. Thus, no search results for your site. Links are a Web site’s word-of-mouth, and without it, a search—like a store or restaurant—is going to fail.

Luckily, it’s easy to check who’s linking to your site by using the search engine. As I said, it’s a Google product, so the tips in Google’s Cheat Sheet apply to our search as well. To see who’s linking to your site, try adding link: ahead of your site, ex. link:www.buffalostate.edu/collegerelations. This shows me everywhere on our Web site that links to the College Relations index page.

There are other things that affect search rankings. Making sure your site is found, however, is an easy first step. The moral of this story? Next time you can’t find something, consider this: it may not exist in the first place.

As part of the refresh, we are adding some exciting new features to our search results. I hope to write more about those soon. In the meantime, do you have any search issues you’d like to share? If so, comment below.

Posted by Paul Kruczynski at 01:10 PM | Trackback URI