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At the Web Council presentation on the UW's custom google search engine on June 25, 2008, the concept of "subscribed links" were discussed. This new feature allows users of custom search to add specialized search results to the top of the results listing for certain search results. Google has many of these helpful tools on its own main search engine (for example, typing 2+2 or any math expression will calculate the result, 12 us dollars in EURO will convert using the current exchange rates, searching for an active US flight number like AA 123 will show flight status information).
Possible subscribed links for the UW search engine
Now that Google has opened this up to developers using Custom Search, there are some great possibilities for use on the UW search engine. Some examples include:
- Commencement/Graduation. Show the date and start time, with a link to more details.
- Other major events... perhaps even auto-populating this out of the official UW calendar for events that are happening within a week or two?
- Campus maps. Type in a building name or abbreviation (e.g., "MGH") and show a small view of the campus map, with a link to the full campus map.
- Initiative programs like the Common Book. Search for "common book" and show a thumbnail of the book cover, the title of the book, the author, the ISBN, and even a link to buy it straight from the University Bookstore (I'm sure they would love that!!).
- Time schedule/courses. For any course abbreviation, show course information, which would pull from the time schedule in the student database. For example, enter "ENGL 121" and see the times that ENGL 121 meets for the current quarter, a link to the time schedule, a description of the course, a link to the course website, and the instructor names and email address. Much of this could be pulled from the time schedule, and, as a former (recent) student, this would be very powerful.
- Academic calendar events. For example, enter "first day of the quarter" and it would show you the first day of instruction for the next three quarters. Or enter "finals week" and see the dates of finals week for the next three quarters. Others could be "last day of class", "first day of registration", etc.
- Sports schedules. For example, "football schedule" could return something like "The next Huskies football game is this Saturday, October 24 at 4:00 pm against the WSU Cougars.
Watch the game live on FSN or AM1000" and include a link to the rest of the football schedule and to GameTracker and other resources. Obviously, this could work for any sport. - Faculty/staff directory information. Type in an employee's name, and display the contact details for that person right there at the top of the search results. No need to click 4 times to get a person's phone number.
- Hours of business. An easy one might be a search for "IMA hours" which could return something like "Summer Hours for the IMA: 8 AM to 11 PM" with a link to the IMA home page.
- Add more ideas!
Live Example
As a point of example, I created a mirror of the UW custom search engine and added a few very simple subscribed links from the list above. So far, these use static XML files that were easily written by hand. Many of the suggestions above would require the use of XML feeds to provide semi-dynamic data.