The Digital Team in University Relations would like to announce a significant change to our site search. On Monday afternoon, we’ll be conducting a beta release of a new search product called Coveo. After the update, when you search U of A using the site search at the top right corner of the page, you’ll see a new search results page.
New features
We’re excited to make this new site search public. The search results page will now allow you to narrow your results by facets, including by faculty. In the future, we can create even more facets and categories as we work together to improve and align the metadata and structure of our pages.
Previous search tool still available during beta
During the beta period, the previous site search tool will still be available. You can find it through a link on the search results page. Coveo uses different processes to return search results that over time will learn which pages are most requested. As a result, the order of results might not be the same in this new product.
Providing feedback during the beta
The beta period will last until the end of September. During that time, we’d like your feedback on the new site search. There will be a survey linked on the results page for you to share your thoughts or to report bugs. Your involvement in this public beta is invaluable to us, and will help us improve Coveo even after we close the beta.
Why make this change
We decided to make this change for two reasons. First and most important, search is the most important tool for finding information on our website. More than 1.2 million searches were made through site search last year. We wanted a product that would give us more features today and allow us to add new content sources to our search results in the future. In short, we want to make search more useful for you. Second, the product currently used for site search, Google Custom Search Engine, has had features removed over the years, and it’s uncertain if Google intends to support the product longterm.