Funnelback Books London School of Economics
April 14, 2010
The LSE (London School of Economics) has adopted the Funnelback search system. According to a news release issued by Squiz, a content management vendor in Australia:
LSE have set up Funnelback to search all external LSE Web site content as the default. Searches can also be restricted to specific groups or faculties. The public events search facility on the LSE website is also powered by Funnelback. This helps users find out when and where events such as the next concert or public lecture are to be held.
If you are not familiar with Funnelback, it is an open source search solution. The description on the LSE’s Web site says:
LSE uses Funnelback as the search facility for the LSE Web site. Funnelback indexes the LSE website. Submitting a query – word, phrase or question – returns a list of results – pages and documents matching the query – which are sorted by relevance. In addition to this standard search function, Funnelback allows the results to be refined by type, topic, site and file type. This refinement allows results to be more closely associated with the original query thereby aiding discovery of the sought for pages/documents or awareness of their absence from the site.
The service is publicly accessible at http://www.lse.ac.uk. I ran queries on the system and worked through relevance ranked results with different file types clearly marked. The PDF files, for example, are colored blue, which made them easy to spot. Here’s a typical results list:
The search box has a drop down menu that allows the user to limit the results to specific collections.
I find this type of narrowing useful. I was baffled by the link that said, “to improve results, try”. I could not figure out what was happening. I finally figured out that the right hand link to improve my results was a tiny graphic showing the left hand links that allowed refinement by type (which really means topic category), domain, and file type.
There is an advanced search function. The system invites me to fill out a form. The advanced search functions are used by power users but most users whack two or three words in the search box and give the system a go.
Performance was acceptable, but I don’t have a sense of the size of the corpus processed by the system. You can get more information about Funnelback from the firm’s Web site at www.funnelback.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
A freebie.
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Funnelback is not open source