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Introduction
Providing Enterprise Wide and Localized Searching at a Large,
Decentralized Institution
David J. Wang, djw@gdb.org
George Ciervo, ciervo@gdb.org
Division of Biomedical Information Sciences
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine,
Baltimore, MD 21205 USA
http://infonet.welch.jhu.edu/miss_smt.html
Like many research institutions, the Johns Hopkins University is highly decentralized. This lack of
centralization pervades the culture of Johns Hopkins and is evident in nearly every facet of the university's
business. Not surprisingly, many of the university's WWW servers also lack a central point of management that
facilitates effective access. As a result, it is nearly impossible to build a hierarchical navigation structure with
links pointing to all the "most appropriate" locations. Even if such a structure were possible, the continued
development of pages by divisions, departments, labs, offices, and other groups would render any such
navigation arcane. In this environment, an institutional site wide search is imperative.
Furthermore, though many of these sites are small, some are reasonably large in scale. The inclusion of
searching functions in these individual larger sites would provide an additional valid and often necessary
navigation function. Unfortunately, many of these sites lack staff with the appropriate technical skills to
implement such a search. While designing the Hopkins-Wide Search, it was decided that providing a
mechanism to easily allow Hopkins’ web administrators to make their site searchable would add substantial
functionality.
Providing a Uniform Search Interface for All Web Documents
After examining several possible searching solutions, Verity's Topic Internet Server was selected and installed.
The server consists of a search engine, a remote indexer, and an end-user interface. The remote indexer is used
to index multiple Johns Hopkins web sites. Once a site has been indexed, it is maintained as a separate
"collection", allowing a user to search one or multiple collections. A form is provided [URL1] where
webmasters can both register their site and obtain html-code for inclusion in their html pages. This request is
forwarded to the InfoNet Development Group, and the site is included in the index within twenty-four hours.
Once indexed, the site is immediately searchable. The code provided to the webmaster is a form that makes
searching that site possible. All the queries are against the index maintained by InfoNet. Thus, each site may
be queried as part of the master index [URL2], which includes ALL the indexed sites, or as an individual
collection [URL3]. Once the search has been executed, users are presented with a list of the top 25 results.
They have the option of paging forward or backward through their results. Users also have the ability to
improve their search by requiring that additional words be present, by weighting certain words, or by requiring
the abscence of certain words. Finally, users searching in individual sites have the option to continue their
localized site search or to expand their search to all the indexed documents.
Expanding the Hopkins Wide Search
In reviewing the server logs after the search had been put online, it was discovered that a number of queries
were directory-type requests, i.e., users looking for personnel and contact information, and hence the need for a
"one-stop-search" was recognized. Since there is no single and definitive online Hopkins directory, it was vital
that this search not be limited to web documents, but also include other web-accessible information. As a