Found it! Yale adopts new search engine

If you’ve used the search box on the main yale.edu web pages or the Yale Portal website recently, you might have noticed some big differences in the results you’ve received — not the least of which is that there were likely more of them.

The search engine previously used on those sites had a cap on the number of pages that it would search, about 2 million, yet there are now more than 12 million pages on the yale.edu site. The new technology, Google^TM Custom Search (GSC), “crawls” 100% of these pages, thereby providing more accurate results.

GCS retains all of the features of the old search engine — including the ability to sort by “relevance” or “date” and to promote websites based on keywords, for example — while adding some new twists. Results now feature thumbnail images, when available, and users can filter the results by “web” or “image.”

Improving search functions at Yale is a critical piece of the ITS web improvement initiative currently underway at Yale. ITS collaborated with the Office of Public Affairs and Communications to test and deploy the GCS technology on the main yale.edu web pages and the Yale Portal website. Over the next year, ITS will be reaching out to areas on campus using the old search service to plan with them a migration to the more modern technology.