VT Search

Virginia Tech currently uses Google Public Service Search as its primary search engine. This is a free service provided by Google to non-profit organizations. It lacks some flexibility in areas such as site indexing and returning results multiple domains. It does, however, offer a number of mechanisms for providing search at a very good price. The following outlines how to add search to your Web site and how to modify the settings to improve your results:

Adding the Virginia Tech Search to your Web site

If you want to add the Virginia Tech search to your Web site, insert the following HTML code into your Web site and modify the parameters as needed.

<form name="vtsearchform" method="get" action="http://search.vt.edu/query">
<input type="text" name="q" size="25" maxlength="50" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="vt.edu" />
<input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Go" />
</form>

Parameter Details

• Form Action - Notice that the form has action="http://search.vt.edu/query". This is a local page that redirects the accepts queries and redirects them to our Google site. The reason for this is maintainability. If Virginia Tech ever changes search solutions all we have to do is edit one application instead of updating hundreds of forms embedded in HTML pages.
• q - This is the actual query submitted by the user. Attributes such as size, maxlength, and value can be modified to fit your needs. The local page that intercepts this query encodes q as ISO-8859-I before forwarding to Google.
• sitesearch - This is an optional parameter which is typically hidden. This parameter will let you define the site to be searched. Example: sitesearch="it.vt.edu" will only return results from the IT Web site. vt.edu is the default value if nothing is specified.
• hl - This is an optional language parameter which is typically hidden. If not specified, the default value is en (English). This is not a translator. Changing the value to another language will only change the output of Google information and not the search results. Those pages are generally published in English.
• sa - This is an optional parameter for the submit button. You can change the value of the parameter or use images, etc.

Limitations

• Indexing - Google refreshes its entire index about once a month. Some areas, however, are updated more frequently. But we have no way of knowing which areas these are.
• Searching Across Multiple Domains - You cannot specify multiple values for sitesearch to search multiple domains. Multiple domain searches can only occur from the root (vt.edu) level. Then, of course, you are searching all the VT domains.