Google Search Engine to be Replaced on April 20

On April 20th, 2014, IT will be discontinuing the Google Search Appliance service offering in favor of new Google provided search offering called Google Custom Search.  This has implications for you if you:

• Create or manage websites that make use of the current search infrastructure and/or

• You currently have a custom “collection” on the Google Search Appliance that searches a particular subset of LBL pages for you.

Information for both of these scenarios is provided below.  In addition, all users should be aware that IP restricted content (content on LBL websites that has its visibility limited to users on LBL networks) will no longer be indexed by the new service.   Since most protected content is now authenticated instead of IP restricted, this should have little to no impact on most users.

For most purposes, the new service will provide substantially superior search results to users, since unlike the on premises search appliance, the new service will benefit from Google’s main product ranking algorithms and search data.  The new service also supports distributed administration of search engines, so divisional website managers will have substantially better access to maintain their search engines.  Global LBL search and custom divisional searches are both part of the Berkeley Lab Technology Toolkit and are provided at no recharge to the Laboratory community.  

Who will this impact?

You will be impacted If you create or manage websites which provide for the ability to search the google search appliance against the regular LBL collection (all LBL websites)

How this will impact our Google Search Engine Customers

1. If you just provide a link (click here to search), no action is necessary.  All existing links will continue to work (search.lbl.gov, lbl.gov/search, google.lbl.gov, google1.lbl.gov) provided that it is a “bare link” to the search page (not a specially crafted link to a specific collection).
2.  If you provide a search box that searches the regular LBL collection (all LBL websites), you will need to update the search code.  The new code will take the form http://www.lbl.gov/?q=query+string&search_type=google    Please note that this is not available to test at this time, but we will notice you again when it is.  A preview of results is available here: https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=014713365614947559691:qqz_miakyrw   BUT DON’T LINK OR CODE TO THAT URL.
3. Additional documentation will be available in late March

What you need to do

If you currently have a special collection that was created for you (list of these is below), you will need to take action to 1. Recreate/reclaim your search index and 2. Change your websites to correctly point to the new search.   We will try to reach out to known customers, but some of the collections in our google Search Appliance are old and contacts may not be accurate.  If you have not heard from us, Please open a helpdesk ticket at help.lbl.gov with the following information:

1. Desired Name of your Search Engine

2. URL patterns to include (example:  http://myproject.lbl.gov/stuff/, http://myproject.lbl.gov/hello/,   or http://myproject.lbl.gov/ which would include both of the above.   As an administrator, you’ll also have the ability to manage these yourself going forward.

3. URL patterns to exclude (optional)

4. Names of at least two administrators in your organization who will manage the search engine (must be LBL Google Account users).

Special GSA Collections

We are not sure all of the GSA collections are active - but this is the list we have as of 3/17/14