Check the next issue of IT forUM for answers from askIT.

Dear askIT,

When I search for my web site, why doesn’t it come up in the university search engine? I use http://www.search.umd.edu.

Not There

Hi Not There,

There are three things you can do to help make your web site more "findable." First of all, our search engine uses a "spider" program to scan through university web space, following links from page to page, and generating an automatic index of the words on the pages. When a search request is submitted, the engine goes to this spider-generated index to match for the query terms, and then it gives you a list of the relevant pages. But if there is no link to your web site from another university web site, the spider won't have been able to find and index your site, and your pages won't come up in the search results. You can submit your URL directly to the search engine for indexing: go to http://www.search.umd.edu and select the "Add URL" link. Another thing to consider is that the terms in the Document Title of your web page will be weighted the heaviest and will score the most points in determining which web pages come up first in the search results. So you need to make sure that your <title>Is Descriptive and Not Just an Acronym</title>. The third thing you can do is to put Metatags in your HTML code. Visit http://www.search.umd.edu/help/meta.html for more information on using Metatags.

Note: WAM and GLUE pages are not indexed by the University of Maryland Search Engine.

Dear askIT,

I want to put up multimedia files on my web site and I'm not sure what I need to think about in doing this.

AV Guy

Dear AV Guy

The first thing you need to determine is exactly what you want to do, and who will be using the files. It's very easy to put up audio and video files on your web site that will be downloaded to people's computers and played by their own desktop programs. If you do this, you'll want to make sure the files are small, since people have to worry about download time. Another way to do audio and video is to "stream" your files. You'll need a media server (Real Server, Quicktime, etc.) and then you'll create streaming media files—which will be played directly from the server and not from the user's desktop. You may choose to do this if your audience seems likely to have access to faster connections (56K modem, T1, etc.). The Office of Information Technology has a streaming media server available for use by faculty and staff. Please visit http://www.media.umd.edu for terms of use and associated costs.