How U of M's Search Engine Works

U of M uses Google as the university's search engine. The search engine crawls the entire web site, consisting of hundreds of thousands of Web pages. We can help the search engine deliver the best results possible. If you have questions or comments on the results you get with U of M's Search, please share them with us via e-mail at webmaster@umanitoba.ca

The PageRank System

In Google's words, this is how the Google Search Appliance works: The heart of Google is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

How Web Pages Are Found by Google

The Google Search Appliance finds web sites by crawling through the University of Manitoba's official web site. A web site will only be picked up if it is linked through an official U of M web site. For a variety of reasons including a limitation on the number of pages the university search engine can crawl and store, the university search engine will not pick up all pages located in the umanitoba.ca domain, including any personal web sites.

Webmasters interested in how their site(s) appear at google.com should consult Google Information for Webmasters.