Building a Smarter Campus Home Site: Learning From Users’ Activities Derk Adams Director of Internet Development University of California, Riverside University of California Computing Services Conference August 2005

Overview Current Development Issues New Requirements New Features System Information

Current Development Issues Large Number of Web Sites

Current Development Issues Increase in Number and Complexity of Web Sites

Current Development Issues Lack of Communication From Web Developers

Current Development Issues Fewer Resources to Maintain Campus Site

Current Development Issues Greater Diversity of Users

Current Development Issues Increase in User Expectations

Current Development Issues Divergence Between Administration Desires and Users’ Needs

New Requirements Automatic Discovery of Resources

New Requirements Quality Results

New Requirements Focused Marketing and Informative Messages

New Requirements No Registration

New Features Automatic Discovery of Resources Search Engine

New Features Excellent Results –Use Tracking to Modify Future Results

New Features Focused Marketing/Informative Messages –Track Message use to Focus Messages

New Features Browse Words –Words Reserved for Special Handling

System Information Search Engine –Currently using a spider written in Perl and data stored in a MySQL database –Implementing iVia and open source search engine developed at UC Riverside for the UC Library system.

System Information Search Result Feedback Loop –Each result link clicked is a vote for that link for that search term –Future results for the search term are reordered based on link votes –Popular and useful links move to the top of the results while less useful ones descend

System Information Track Messages –Information is gathered across campus through RSS feeds –Each feed link clicked is a vote for that feed for that search term –Feeds are shown based on popularity –Random feed is still included to integrate new feeds

System Information Browse Words –Certain search terms are reserved –Instead of a search result, results are grouped for a topic (students) –Each link clicked is a vote for the page –Each search done is a vote for the page –Results are reordered based on vote list –Cyclic events are predicted by using historical data

Derk Adams iVia (infomine.ucr.edu/iVia/) UC Riverside (