Present: Dr. Raymond Palmer, Dr. Joseph Lucke, Alan Miller, Tom Raymond, Dr. Frank Stafford, Susan Hallmark, Mary Yanes and Jim Barrett.
Dr. Raymond Palmer, the chair, opened the meeting, and received approval of the Feb. 25 minutes. Jim Barrett gave the webmaster's report. He said:- Server traffic in February rose 9 percent, to 1,250,884 page views
- The campus calendar software is being tested by the Department of Medicine, and the University Relations Office
- The CampusCam will be added to the web portal in the next week or two
- A telephone directory error on the web has been fixed
In new business, Dr. Palmer asked Mr. Barrett to discuss his issues with the current university search engine.
Mr. Barrett said the search engine, which uses Phantom software, has become troublesome. Software updates have not worked, the "crawler" hangs up when indexing web sites, and he has received complaints about the results of searches. He said the free Google search engine may be an alternative, and discussed benefits and drawbacks.
Dr. Joseph Lucke said he had run some sample searches using both search engines. Dr. Frank Stafford also said he had run some sample searches. Mr. Barrett used their keywords, and the committee examined results.
The members discussed the results, and seemed to agree the Google results were better. They noted that Google searches of common terms also brought several entries of e-mail messages archived at aises.uthscsa.edu and nativenet.uthscsa.edu. Mr. Barrett said the archives contain numerous pages and date back to the 1990s so they often show up in the domain search. He said the free Google search, unlike the Phantom search engine, cannot be restricted in which subdomains it searches. Google offers the restricted searches in its commercial search engine only, Mr. Barrett said.
The committee agreed that it would like to see the Google engine's performance with the archives removed from the domain. Mr. Barrett said he would contact the owner to see if that is possible.
Dr. Palmer asked if there was any other business. There was none, and the meeting was adjourned. The next meeting is scheduled for 9:30-10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 28.
-- Minutes prepared by Jim Barrett
-- Approved 4/28/04