More Expansive Search

By David McKelvey

We’re working our way through some updates to the search engine — you might have noticed it’s dominated our recent posts — and today have tweaked the engine just a little more.

Some of the recent changes are necessary to drive our prototype search engine that will launch late this summer, and others are immediate search upgrades. Friday, we made the search engine ranking more consistent across datatypes (pages, people, news, etc.) for the future engine and today, we changed one of the default settings in the search engine to be more expansive in its comparisons.

You might not notice the difference we made today in your average search, but one day when you’re looking for that obscure bit of information you know you’ve seen somewhere on the site, this expanded comparison method will help you bridge the gap when you’re not quite typing the whole or most matchable version of that idea.

Thank Tom Krattenmaker for this change. It was his feedback on a search for a trustee bio that prompted us to tweak the engine. So if you have some feedback on search, be sure and use the search results feedback. We listen and use your feedback to make judgments about the search upgrades.

And speaking of which, if you’re going to be on campus this summer and want a sneak peek at the new prototype email us about becoming a beta-tester.