<<return to webmaster.idaho.gov
The Department of Administration and Access Idaho have partnered to provide an enterprise-wide search for idaho.gov using Google's search appliance technology.
Try a few test searches for content citizens, businesses and others often look for on your state agency website. Let support@accessidaho.org know if your site or information is not being found.
Some State websites include large (or even infinite) collections of URLs as a part of applications which do things like dynamic content generation from a database. Since the Google appliance licensing is based on the total number of URLs indexed by the Portal, it is generally a good idea to exclude such content areas from the index.
Access Idaho has some control over the crawler and can implement specific exclusion rules when it finds an overly large URL space in the index, but this process is both tedious and error prone. A better solution is for the maintainers and developers of such applications to include instructions telling the crawler what areas of the website to avoid.
Here are two equally useful methods for accomplishing this:
Access Idaho uses the Robots Exclusion Protocol method for its main servers. This involves creating a text file in the root of the website named robots.txt, which instructs robots which documents they are allowed to retrieve from the site.
A Robots META tag can be included in the header of an HTML document to provide specific instructions to a visiting crawler about how to index the document's content and outbound links. A simple example that would disallow indexing and link traversal from the target page looks like: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
A very thorough discussion of robots exclusion can be found at robotstxt.org.
The html title is the text shown as a link in the search results. It can be found in your html at the top of the document. Make sure this text is accurate (not "template" or "untitled"). The title of this page is "Google Search Appliance Information - Idaho.gov." It is good to include both the subject of the page and your agency or organization, so people know exactly where the link takes them.
You will also want to make sure any PDFs, Excel documents, etc. that you publish on the web are titled.
Lay out your pages so keywords and key phrases are in heading tags and, therefore, weighted more heavily.
Ask other agencies to link to your site or content using the words that your customers enter into search boxes.
Google does not reveal all of its secrets, but it does use some of the meta tags. For instance, if you search for a word within the description meta tag, it will return the description sentence as part of the results. It is a good idea to use the Idaho meta tag standard on your pages.
See Meta Tags on webmaster.idaho.org
How can my agency utilize the custom Google search on our site?
The custom search is available to all Idaho state agencies.
A custom search means:
The cost of this service is $50 per month and is billable monthly or annually.
About Idaho.gov |
My Account |
Recursos En Español |
Mobile |
How Are We Doing? |
Search & Help
Accessibility |
Privacy & Security
Copyright © 2006, Idaho.gov. All rights reserved.
