Search for WAI site - comments from our Ed Outreach meeting today

One of the agenda items discussed during our Ed Outreach meeting today was search.   During the discussion Judy mentioned that the approach could be to implement partial search functionality for the redesign of the WAI site, only indexing certain sections of the site in production to solicit feedback from WAI visitors.  My concerns with this approach are:

1.  Even with disclaimer text, the partial search functionality would frustrate and confuse users.
2.  Adding a disclaimer to the search box will not be effective and will also cause site visitors to not use it.  Longer term it will also leave the impression that search is not working as expected and users will remember this on subsequent visits to the site.
3.  If web functionality (search) is truly in development, feedback and QA should be an internal process.  We should not release a site wide search until it indexes all of the WAI site content.

It is my recommendation that we not implement search on the WAI redesign until it can index all of the content for the site.

I am not a search developer but I work closely with the developers who built and maintain https://www.loc.gov/search for the Library of Congress. I can ask if the lead developer has time to advise us on our approach. He probably would not have time to be involved on a continuing basis.

I hope this input helps forward the discussion.

Laura Keen



Open Source Search Technologies

SOLR - search implemented at the Library of Congress
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/


SPHINX
http://sphinxsearch.com/


XAPIAN
https://xapian.org/


INDRI
https://www.lemurproject.org/indri/


Zettair
http://www.seg.rmit.edu.au/zettair/