*** On Tuesdays bring Volume 1 of Programming Easy Ways and on Thursday's bring Volume 2***

Tuesday March 6th 2007

1) Keep working on your C++ Tutorial.  You will have to present your tutorial system to the class.

2) We are going to go over search engines.  We will talk about issues and solutions for problems.

            Search Engine Testing Criteria

       Look for...

       A)  Name of the School or Founder.

       B)  Faculty or Student (ex. Smith)

       C)   A specific course or Dept. (ex. MIS, C++, Programming)

       D)   Special Characters- search for '_' , Blank space, Question Mark ?, Letter 'A'.

       E)   Search for search processing consistency in search engine. (ex.  uppercase, lowercase,  order of name i.e. last name, First name or First Name, Last name.

        F)  The number of clicks it takes to complete a search.

        G)  Is the search intelligent?

                   List of Colleges to Analyze Search Engines

Adelphi University
Briarcliffe College
C.W. Post
Dowling College
Farmingdale State University
Five Towns College
Hofstra University
Long Island University
Molloy College 
Nassau Community College
New York College of Health Professions
NYIT - New York Institute of Technology
Polytechnic University
St. Joseph's College
Stony Brook University
Suffolk County Community College
SUNY Empire State College 
SUNY Old Westbury
Touro Law School
US Merchant Marine Academy
Webb Institute
SUNY at Old Westbury -   www.oldwestbury.edu
Long Island University - www.liu.edu
SUNY Stony Brook – www.sunysb.edu
Suffolk Community College
Hofstra
Molloy
Dowling
Touro
Briarcliffe
New York Institute of Technology – www.nyit.edu
Nassau Community College - www.ncc.edu
Polytechnic University – www.poly.edu
Brooklyn College -www.brooklyn.cuny.edu
Princeton University – www.Princeton.edu
Yale
Cornell

We did the New York College of Health Professions

http://www.nycollege.edu/

They do have a search engine that is powered by Google

A) Searching for the name of the College returns a link to the College's Homepage.

B) Searching for Smith returns information on a pharmaceutical company, no professors.

C) Searching on the term "Courses" did not bring up a list of courses, instead it brought up a major.

D)  If the search box is left blank, the search engine searches for the term "Search"

D)	Searching for a question mark brings up the homepage in the search result.

E)  Searching for faculty brings you to a generic faculty page. ex. Steven Haffner

Jeremy-  Evidence US Merchant Marine Academy

A)  No Search Engine, To find information about the founder you have to  go under News then Academy History.  It was difficult to find information.

B)  Course description link on the bottom of the academic dept page does not link to anything.

Frank- Adelphi

 A) They do have a search but no school history.

B) When you search for Adelphi it returns the faculty listing page.

C)  Search is not intelligent.  It does not do partial searching. When searching for Debbi Smith we typed in D Smith.  It ignored the D.

Searching

Rick- Dowling College

A)  It does have a search box powered by Google. Color is bad, the placement of the search button is on the left side of the input field.  This is inconsistent with the search elsewhere in the site.

Typing in the name of the college brings up the college homepage.

Typing in a blank space or a ? brings the search results back to the college home page.

Searching without entering anything brings up no results.

Searching for CIS brings up information on the Certificate in Computer Information Systems,

Norman- St. Joseph's

Searching for the school name takes you to the about page for the college.

The school uses a third party search program called freefind.com  The school does not indicate that the search engine is from freefind and not their own program.

Search does not return any result when a blank space is used.

When no criteria is entered the page puts that no criteria is found.

Andrea- Nassau Community College

There is no search box on the main page of the site.  However you can only search their faculty/staff directory

Asma - Stony Brook University

Does have a Search box but it's UltraSeek not an in house solution.

When searching for Stony Brook in the text box you are brought to the Staller Center website.  When you search for Stony Brook University you are brought to the emergency management web page.

The search is broken up into various segments- faculty and Staff.

Putting in a question mark into the site returns results with coding at the top.

Searching for a blank space returns no results found.

Preety  NYIT

Search is present but not easy to find.  Searching for NYIT does not return any results.

Searching for the New York Institute of Technology you are brought to the schedule for commencement 2007.

They have two searches on their site one for faculty one for the site.

Monica- Empire College.

Typing in the the name of the college does not bring up the index page.

It reads a + sign as a boolean AND not text.

Hofstra-

    Typing in the name of the college brings up the school of law's page.

Typing in C++ brings up a law professor.  The search engine ignores the ++.

Cornell-

Search is very hard to identify. The foreground and background are the same color.

Searching for the school name brings up the Alumni page.

Search is intelligent, and will do fuzzy searching for instance misspelling Ezra Cornell.

However the results under Ezra Cornell had nothing to do with what we were looking form instead it was an FAQ for  health and counseling.

Searching for a space or a ? returned no results.

Princeton-

3) Comments/Questions