2024

March

• Collapsed similar results to group related content together. This groups duplicate results together.
• Update to synonyms list to align commonly used words with academic language. This means natural language searches should align more closely to the language we use on the University website.
• Adding and altering best bet based on feedback to help promote specific results e.g. "te kauae parāoa", "otago business school", "business objects", "financeone" & "map".
• Open result in a new tab now works.

February

• Improved best bet results to help promote specific results for common queries. For example, searching for "current vacancies" returns the "job vacancies" as a promoted result.
• Page descriptions changed to be dynamic to help identify correct results. For example, the "sports leave" query results now show the following description under the heading: "Sports leave. To represent New Zealand in a national sports team..."
• Size limit on PDF indexing increased to include larger PDFs in search results.

January

• Core synonyms re-imported to help expand commonly used synonyms used at the University. For example, "maths" now also returns results for "mathematics".
• NZ indexers added to improve macron functionality. For example "Māori" can now be found with "Māori", "Maaori" and "Maori".
• Investigation into multiple search results for the same page. One page can come up multiple times as separate results. We are investigating a way to reduce these entries to just one result.
• Additional 'Best Bets' added based on feedback to help promote specific results e.g. "te kauae parāoa", "otago business school", "business objects", "financeone" & "map".
• Content improvements are also underway to include more commonly used language.

2023

December

• Wildcard search enabled to expand search results using wildcards. For example, searching "John S*" will now return results for "John Smith" as well as "John Savage"
• Best bets list curated to help promote specific results for common queries. For example, searching for "Māori" returns the "School of Māori Studies" as a promoted result.
• Indexing options adjusted to ensure all pages are indexed. This means more pages will show up in results.
• Enable side navigation to be crawled, so pages that are only accessible through the side navigation will show up in results.
• Tuning run enabled and working. This means the search engine can use a certain set of results to tune and improve its algorithm, so that the search is more likely to return useful results.