Overview of Search Services
The Shared Web Hosting (SWH) team maintains a Google Search Appliance which houses the statewide search index. The index is built continuously, as the Google Search Appliance crawls state agency, board, and commission websites starting from the agency listing on Ohio.gov. The resulting index is used when a visitor accesses the portal search. A dropdown list is provided to search individual agency websites. Agencies can take advantage of the dropdown list by requesting to be included. The search index currently has a 1 million document capacity.
Search Optimization
SWH can assist state agencies, boards, and commissions with optimizing their websites for both the statewide Google search index and for searches on Google.com. Please see the Search Optimization and Google Best Practices pages for tips on improving your agency's search results.
For users who want to further customize their search experience, SWH provides guidance on using KeyMatch terms to control search results. For agencies interested in implementing KeyMatch, SHW provides a form to request KeyMatch terms. In addition, SWH also provides a form to request synonyms for searching.
Excluding Content
The Excluding Content From Search page describes the ways in which state agencies and the Search Administrators can hide pages or domains from the statewide Google index. Website owners (state agencies) can use Robots.txt files to control indexing at the directory level and Robots Meta Tags to control indexing at the page level. In addition, the Search Administrators can use Domain and/or URL Exclusion Rules to exclude content from the statewide Google index
As with search optimization, the tips for excluding content apply to both the statewide Google search index and searches on Google.com.
Adding a Search Box To An Agency Website
Agencies that are included on the statewide search dropdown list have the option to put an agency-specific search box on the agency website. Visitors to the site who use this search box will search the statewide index for content, and the results will only come from the agency's domain. The Add Search To Agency Websites page includes the HTML code for adding the search box to an agency website.