Google and Domino - Part 3 - Day-to-day administration
Category Google IBM/Lotus
So you have your Google Search Appliance (the GSA), you're getting great search results back (and yes, your results probably *will* be really good), and life is grand.
But what do you need to do on a day-to-day basis? It depends...
The GSA has an administration console that allows you to modify the templates, set up related queries, and otherwise control features that affect what you get back. It's also how you get reports on what's been searched for, how many searches have occurred, etc. In my opinion, this is where Google needs to focus their effort on improvement...
There is no API for the administration console. If you want to add related queries or acronyms and abbreviations, you have to use the console to do it manually. Your other option is to build a "screen scraper" application that attempts to simulate the HTTP POST of a console submission. Obviously that's risky, but it's also one of the few options you have if you want to maintain a tight rein on GSA console access.
Why would you want to control console access? Well, there are only two access roles in the GSA console: administrator and manager. Administrators have access to everything. Managers are the ones you'd want to have running reports or updating abbreviations on a particular set of templates. Unfortunately, some of the things that a manager has access to are *not* a good thing. For instance, they can modify (or even delete) the template design. If you do that, your search results are completely broken. I hope you had backups. Of course, you can train these selected individuals NOT to touch the templates, but it's a bad thing any way you look at it. It'd be much nicer if you could define a role with granular levels of access to specific parts of the console, and then assign those roles as necessary. I'm sure Google will get there some day, but they're not there yet.
If you don't have a high volume of dynamic abbreviation/acronym changes, or if you aren't going to have a lot of situations where you return a given search result for a specific keyword, then you may not have to do much of anything with the console. On the other hand, if you're actively wanting to return particular pages when certain key terms are searched for, you may be living in the console. Just something to keep in mind...
So you have your Google Search Appliance (the GSA), you're getting great search results back (and yes, your results probably *will* be really good), and life is grand.
But what do you need to do on a day-to-day basis? It depends...
The GSA has an administration console that allows you to modify the templates, set up related queries, and otherwise control features that affect what you get back. It's also how you get reports on what's been searched for, how many searches have occurred, etc. In my opinion, this is where Google needs to focus their effort on improvement...
There is no API for the administration console. If you want to add related queries or acronyms and abbreviations, you have to use the console to do it manually. Your other option is to build a "screen scraper" application that attempts to simulate the HTTP POST of a console submission. Obviously that's risky, but it's also one of the few options you have if you want to maintain a tight rein on GSA console access.
Why would you want to control console access? Well, there are only two access roles in the GSA console: administrator and manager. Administrators have access to everything. Managers are the ones you'd want to have running reports or updating abbreviations on a particular set of templates. Unfortunately, some of the things that a manager has access to are *not* a good thing. For instance, they can modify (or even delete) the template design. If you do that, your search results are completely broken. I hope you had backups. Of course, you can train these selected individuals NOT to touch the templates, but it's a bad thing any way you look at it. It'd be much nicer if you could define a role with granular levels of access to specific parts of the console, and then assign those roles as necessary. I'm sure Google will get there some day, but they're not there yet.
If you don't have a high volume of dynamic abbreviation/acronym changes, or if you aren't going to have a lot of situations where you return a given search result for a specific keyword, then you may not have to do much of anything with the console. On the other hand, if you're actively wanting to return particular pages when certain key terms are searched for, you may be living in the console. Just something to keep in mind...
| Permalink |
Comments
In reference to the meta tags, I'm curious how you set the Last Modified date for google to use in it's date sort and also curious what other tags you are generating for Google to use.
I'm using the following formula in my WebQueryOpen event to generate the Last Modified date. I hate that I need to add this to every form in the dbs that we use in our global intranet, so I was wondering if you were doing it differently.
Last Modified formula in WebQueryOpen event:
myDateStr := @TimeToTextInZone(@Modified;"Z=0$ZN=GMT");
myDate := @TextToTime(myDateStr);
@SetHTTPHeader("Last-Modified"; @TimeMerge( @Date(myDate);@Time(myDate) ; "Z=0$ZN=GMT" ))
Plus, to suppress old/archived documents from getting indexed by Google, I added a google search suppress checkbox and put the following code in the forms HTML Head Content area. Just curious if you addressed this and how you handled.
@If(SuppressSearchCB != "";"<META name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,nofollow\">";"")
You mentioned about putting keywords inthe google admin panel to have items sort to top of the list. Can we do via html in the form/document and have the end user enter the keywords when they create the document?
Posted by null At 09:21:46 On 14/02/2008 | - Website - |