Education
Leading educational institutions, such as the University of Florida , have turned to the Google Search Appliance as a simple, effective way to allow students and faculty to share everything from curriculum requirements to current research between systems that aren't integrated. The Google Search Appliance is an integrated hardware and software product that uses Google's powerful search engine technology to bring universal search to your business.


How you'll benefit
  • Enhance access to information for students - Enable students to easily access relevant information, including course schedules, curriculum, prerequisites, campus activities, and other information

  • Aggregate information in a distributed environment - Instead of paying high-priced consulting to integrate the multiple information silos across your institution, your users can easily access all information through one search box. Additionally, you can set appropriate access controls, to ensure students, faculty, and staff only access information appropriate to them.

  • Increase productivity of faculty, staff, and advisors - With Google's universal search, faculty can easily search for research and other documents online, and university staff can share any administrative documents. Additionally, advisors can spend less time explaining basic information to students, as much of it can be found online.

Customer Impact

University of Florida - Located in Gainesville, Florida, the University of Florida is a major research university whose information needs are enormous: 300,000 documents on hundreds of servers, with 58,000 users sending up to 12,000 queries per day. In order to improve information access for students, faculty and staff alike, the University deployed the Google Search Appliance, which helped bring together content from a highly distributed environment and enabled a central administrator to satisfy the diverse needs of webmasters across the system.

"We took the Google Search Appliance and our previous solution and plugged the top 100 searches from the UF home page into both to see who gave us the most relevant results," says Mark Trammell, a web administrator at the university. "Hands down, Google beat the solution we used before."

For the full case study, click here.



Illinois State University - Founded in 1857, Illinois State University was the first public university in the state and is one of the Midwest's oldest institutions of higher education. To improve online user experience, the University implemented a customized Course Finder powered by the Google Search Appliance to bring up-to-the-minute course information to 20,000 students, over 1,000 faculty members and the public at large.

"The Google package lets us present information from mainframe databases in useful and unique ways," says Todd Helgeson, the University System Manager. Advisors have discovered that the Course Finder enhances their ability to easily inform students of prerequisites and degree requirements. "Just about everyone already knows how to 'Google.'" says Helgeson. "From the user's perspective, there's nothing new to learn."

For the full case study, click here.