Johns Hopkins Cures Its Search Woes

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December 28, 2000 (8:51 AM EST)

By David Drucker,

Johns Hopkins University was set to bask in the spotlight of a major television network -- until it realized its fame would be short-lived if it didn't get its search engines up to speed.

ABC Television was preparing to air a six-part series on the school's medical center this past summer. The series, Hopkins 24/7, would direct viewers to www.hopkinsmedicine.org to learn more about the hospital and university.

According to Scott Briggs, director of enterprise services, many of the requests would likely call for information on related sites. Problem was, the multiple search technologies in place were not sufficient: Searches often took more than 10 seconds and would not return satisfactory results, said Briggs.

"The entire campus was not indexed as a whole, so you got a response, but that wouldn't include things from across the campus," he said.

The university had less than two months to select and implement a new search capability to unify its many sites.

Hopkins chose Inktomi's Ultraseek software (renamed Inktomi Search/Enterprise) -- largely because it offered the best prospects for getting an engine up and running quickly and easily, and because it had been successfully deployed at other universities, Biggs said. Scalability was another issue, as Hopkins planned to index about 500,000 documents.

Hopkins was able to install the software without outside help other than Inktomi (stock: INKT) telephone technical support, Biggs said. Hopkins is running the software on a single, redundant, multiprocessor Windows NT server.

A key to the successful deployment was that Hopkins didn't need to do much manual work to reindex materials on its sites. The software spiders to find all documents linked to Hopkins sites and automatically indexes them. That process took less than 36 hours, Biggs said. The software also discovers which sites link to the main sites. Webmasters at all sites that link to Hopkins' main sites were contacted and given code that would let their sites utilize the same search engine as the main ones.

The search engine was deployed with enough time to allow nearly two weeks of testing and tuning. There was even time to review much of Hopkins' Web content to remove outdated pages and to transfer pertinent information to more prominent places.

The six-part TV series aired in August and September. The search engine, said Briggs, has performed successfully with no slowdowns -- and all indications are that users are getting accurate results. Webmasters across the university's sites report that traffic has remained higher than before the show aired.

Another lasting benefit of having strong and unified search capability across the university: "Website owners are getting more feedback," said Briggs. "And we're finding that sites are presenting much better and more up to date information."