Quick Access
Finding information in a vast sea of Web sites, PDFs, etc… can be a daunting task, especially when what you are looking for may be named differently. In comes “Quick Access” to the rescue.
Quick Access is an open source JQuery solution to finding information based on keywords. We will be rolling it out on our A to Z Index with the new design as well as other areas in the future. Try it out here:
http://www.apsu.edu/beta/atoz
August 4th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
The search feature is really neat. I believe the APSU community and visitors will be able to find what they are looking for a lot better with this improvement.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am
I think this is a very nice feature!
I had a few problems though… I know this is just what you wanted to hear! When I clicked on the “E”, nothing happened (perhaps a bad target?) , although all the other letters seemed to work just fine. Then I typed “education” in the query box, and it told me to “keep typing”. I’m afraid our education students will have a hard time finding our site
August 10th, 2008 at 9:11 am
This *could* be a good feature. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced these types of search engines on other sites and they’ve been frustrating. The key to success in this kind of a search engine is to ensure the metadata (keywords, etc) are good keywords. I did a search on “student jobs” and “job” and nothing came up. What if I didn’t know that “Human Resources” was the way to locate a “student job?”
This shouldn’t just be a way to quickly access items that are already in the “A to Z” index.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Thanks for your comments.
However, I have to disagree that it should not just be used for the A-Z Index. Quick Access was developed for universities as a way for their users to easily sift through a large page of links. Therefore, our A-Z Index is the perfect use for this technology.
And, it really isn’t a search engine as much as a keyword crawler within the A-Z Index. It indexes all of the link tags within the code and displays results based on those. So, it is heavily based on URL names. But, there is also a way to add additional keyword to each link tag. Therefore, it is good to get feedback like yours and Dr. Wall’s which let us know exact issues with certain links. We can remedy these. Thanks.