CUNY Academic Commons

This sounds very cool. Looking forward to learning more.

Hi All,

Just a data point I discovered while searching for a site. The site is public so it should presumably come up in a search on the Commons.

The site title is "The Global Spanish-Speaking Community (SPAN 2204)". A search for "Spanish", "global Spanish", and "global spanish-speaking" return few results none of which are this site.

When I search in groups with the same terms the private group appears in search results and when I click into the group, I can see that there is a connected site.

I am wondering if because this instance was set up as a group/site, if the connection to a group is obscuring the site in a search for the site. In other words, group/site sites do not seem to come up in sites searches since they are connected to a group.

Since professors may setup groups only for emailing and they may request that students find a join the site. If group/site sites not coming up in site searches, we may want to fix this in our overhaul of the search functionality.

Laurie, the issue in this case is that the site is not, in fact, fully public; it's set to "discourage search engines...". As such, it's not listed in the Sites directory, and won't turn up in searches. This point came up recently in https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11201#note-7. IMO this is less a question about search and more about what shows up in directories, as it's perhaps not surprising that things hidden from directories would not turn up in directory search.

Hi Boone,

Thanks for this info. Sorry to being up repeat issues in another ticket. I didn't realize that "discourage search engines..." meant sites were totally hidden from the Commons internal directory. I assumed this was a "public but not so public" option that meant that sites would be less likely to be crawled by the likes of Google but would still be searchable on the Commons itself. I am not sure if it is clearly enough outlined in the language of this setting that the site is actually unsearchable anywhere (across google and the Commons) so we may want to consider changing the language? Just a suggestion.

Boone, is this something that could be built in a way that it could apply to both the Commons and CBOX/CBOX-OL? If so maybe we can look into combining funding from a few sources.

Chris Stein wrote:

Boone, is this something that could be built in a way that it could apply to both the Commons and CBOX/CBOX-OL? If so maybe we can look into combining funding from a few sources.

Yes, in part. However, writing something that's shareable with CBOX makes the initial task more complex, which would offset some of the benefits of sharing costs. Definitely something to think about, though.