John, I will be interested in your comments and others concerning the search engine.

At work, we are testing Google on our Intranet (over 100,000 documents). We've had success so far. However there's one feature that I'd like to hear some opinion about.

With many search engines, including Ultraseek - our current search engine, the description displayed in search results is usually the first 200+ characters found on a page, or the contents of the Meta Description tag. Google ignores the Meta Description tag and instead, displays text around the keyword or phrase searched on the page.

I feel the quality of the description depends on the quality of the content on the page.

I'd like to see some other thoughts on this from individuals who have tested Google on their sites.

Posted by: Dennis Deacon on June 30, 2002 10:41 PM

 

I never look at the link descriptions, but it seems like Google *should* give the user the choice of seeing the meta tag, or first 200 characters or the keyword reference.

Posted by: Jack on July 1, 2002 01:03 AM

 

Another item just discovered...

If you use Google for site-specific searches, the search key word/phrase criteria, along with site-specific criteria appear in the search box on the results page. While it's a usability benefit to display the previously searched criteria, I think it's a usuability issue to force the site-specific criteria in the search box.

For instance, if I perform a site-specific search on www.sunstonetours.com for the term "cruise alaska," The following criteria appears in the search box on the search results page...

cruise alaska site:www.sunstonetours.com

If the results don't provide me with what I'm looking for, I may perform another search using different criteria. If I delete the previous search criteria and replace it with new criteria (without the site:www...), it displays results from the entire Internet, not just from the desired site.

Thoughts? Comments?

Posted by: Dennis Deacon on July 2, 2002 01:32 PM