About Web Search

Try the new search service here!

Why do we need this?

Although the current search solution at KTH is good, we still felt that it lacked in certain areas. With more and more information being migrated to KTH Social, and much of this information being visible only by certain, logged in, users, we had to find a smart way to incorporate all of this data in the main website search experience.

Apart from this, we also wanted to make use of the fact that we know much more about our own sites than google does. We know what pages presents an interesting new research paper, what organizational unit a certain member of staff works at and what date and time an upcoming event is scheduled to take place. Instead of searching for people, places, courses and events, our users should be able to see all the vital information directly in the search results.

Opening up data from KTH Social and different entities in our systems is one important aspect of the search solution. Another is making all of this avaliable for other services. We wanted to make sure that everything the user can consume through our search box, he or she could also consume through a rich API. This way clever students, thrifty buisnesses or other educational institutions could create mobile apps, webpages and a whole lot more, incoportaing all of the work we put into making our search solution as good as I is.

How did we do it?

The first step toward making our search solution become what it is today was cleaning up all the stuff we wanted to be searchable. By creating rules for indexing on our 600+ domains here at KTH, collecting and sorting data that was spread out over different servers and systems, analyzing search data gathered from our old search solution and evaluating what kind of things people often searched for - we laid the foundation for the rest of the project.

Next came the identification of what we call entities. An entity is a news article, a calendar event, a course, a programme, a person and a whole lot of other stuff. These are things we know contain properties that sets them apart from just a regular web page. We knew we would know more about these properties than regular "big" Google would, and therefore tried to incorporate as much of this as possible when creating the search experience.

What does the future hold?

We started this project with the ambition of creating the best educational search experience to date. With this first beta release, we think we've taken a big step towards achieving this goal. However; we're not done yet.

There are more entities to discover, smarter ways to present results and more data to be fetched, sorted and stored. There is currently work being done with greatly improving the personal profiles on the KTH web. We'll make sure to follow the progression of this project closely, and make it an integral part of the search experience.

If you feel like something is missing in the current search, or that something is a little bit off - don't hesitate to tell us! Just head over to the page Ideas and suggestions we are considering and spill your heart.

Att ta upp

• API
• Entiteter
• bättre sök
• jobba med att underlätta att hitta
• baserat på sök
• meta-data