At University of Albany Libraries, we have implemented Google Mini (http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/), an enterprise search appliance, to enhance the findability and discoverability of our ever-growing Web resources and unique digital collections. A plug-and-play search engine in a blue server box, Google Mini robots industriously plow through our Website, Intranet, blogs, locally developed databases, and digital collections. With Google’s proprietary search technology, these disparate repositories can thus search individually or en masse (universally) with improved quality (relevance), performance (latency), usefulness (presentation), and thoroughness (comprehensiveness).

In our presentation, we will share our 3-month experience in deploying Google Mini to facilitate the discovery to delivery (D2D) process of our digitized local collections, including Albany Student Newspaper, University records, and records from the Civil Service Employees Association. Furthermore, we will discuss how we influence and improve search results using Mini’s unique features, including KeyMatch, Related/Suggested Queries, Self-Learning (Heuristic) Spell Checker, Result Biasing, Language Filter, and Search Report. We will further demonstrate the flexibility of customizing the layout of the “search box” and result display, using the XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) script. Furthermore we will discuss the integration of Google search appliances with traffic statistics generated by Urchin (http://www.google.com/urchin/), another Google product, to improve the effectiveness and success of our Website.