![[logo] US EPA](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/eot2008/20090825063850im_/http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
WARNING NOTICE
This is a United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) computer system, which may be accessed and used only for official Government business. Unauthorized access or use of this computer system may subject violators to criminal, civil, and/or administrative action. All information on this computer system may be monitored, recorded, read, copied, and disclosed by and to authorized personnel for official purposes, including law enforcement. Access or use of this computer system by any person, whether authorized or unauthorized, constitutes consent to these terms.
Search Central is a collection of all resources related to the EPA search engine as well as some outside search resources you might find useful.
If you're looking for the Raw search logs they're here.What's New?
June 2, 2009. Please help us evaluate our new search results ranking
Our test page for choosing a ranking scheme.
EPA supplements the built-in Northern Light ranking algorithm with custom weights for special metadata fields. The metadata applies to the 32K select documents stored in the Web Inventory (WEBI) 
. We recently undertook redesigning from the ground up the way we boost these selected documents. We developed and tested several schemes, and finally chose Minotaur.
We tested a lot of queries, but the only way to know how well we did is for you to tell us. Please take some time to run some searches from the EPA home page today, some familiar, some unfamiliar.
- What queries did you run? What is your general impression of the documents returned?
- Was there a document you thought was best for a particular query? Where did it appear in the results? What is the URL of that document?
- Were there documents returned for a particular query that really didn't belong? What are the URLs?
- Can you spot any trends, such as "It was better with long queries than short queries" or "It was better with broad concepts than specific items"?
March 16, 2009. New version of intranet search released
EPA@Work
Intranet search got a major upgrade on Monday, March 16, with a new release of the Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine, and a new version of the web application with many new features:
- Three new ways to search: EPA@Work, Regions or All. Use the radio buttons to choose the "scope" of your search, national, regional or everything.
- Ajax autocomplete will suggest queries as you type them in the search box.
- The new spellchecker will offer suggestions for misspelled words. We will be adding EPA-specific vocabulary to the dictionary as we find it.
- New EPA@Work Search browser addon will let you search the intranet from the search bar built into your browser. Read more about the EAP@Work Search browser addon.
- Search terms are now highlighted in the descriptions on the search results page
February 9, 2009. New jQuery-based autocomplete available in new Agency template
New template with autocomplete
This is the development page for the next version of the Agency template. The search box in the upper right has autocomplete implemented using JQuery.
January 23, 2009. Preliminary Web CMS conversion "Tidy" site scan results available
Tidy site scan results
Tidy is an open source utility that converts HTML files to XHTML, and scans for common HTML coding errors. We are using Tidy to convert our HTML content files on www.epa.gov to XHTML, so we can extract the content in XML format (XHTML is well-formed XML), and load it to the Web Content Management System. We ran a scan to estimate how many fatal errors Tidy would generate. Find your TSSMS on this report to get an estimate of the number of errors, and click the TSSMS to see the details. Tip: The error summary report in the left sidebar is the easiest way to get a quick picture of your errors.
December 9, 2008. FAQ Search implemented in production
If you run a search from anywhere in public access, you may see a box on the right side that says Related question and answers. This is the new FAQ search feature, that takes advantage of the many excellent answers in RightNow databases throughout the Agency. If you add a database that you think is useful to the public, we will add it to the FAQ Search.
November 25, 2008. FAQ User test
Search with FAQ feature
Use this page to try the search with the new FAQ search featured enabled. To get to the dedicated FAQ search page, search on a common word, then click "View all ... answers for ..." at the bottom of the Related questions and answers box. Send your comments to Peter Buch.
October 29, 2008. Test form for FAQ search.
FAQ Search
This is a very basic test form to display the data in the new FAQ collection. The end result will look a lot different (better).
July 22, 2008. Ajax-based autocomplete available for testing and comments.
Ajax autocomplete
The autocomplete (a.k.a. augosuggest) feature displays a dropdown of suggested queries as you type. This implementation uses the script.aculo.us helpers. For starters, we're using a .4 second delay and a 2 character minimum. So far, we think we need to 1. pare down our suggestions a little 2. add a slider to the dropdown and 3. autorun the query when you click a suggestion. What do you think?
June 6,2008. New User Interface for search implemented
June 30,2008. Try out the EPA Search browser add-on
Search page with browser addon
Follow the instructions on this page to add EPA Search to your browser search tools.
June 6,2008. New User Interface for search implemented
Advanced search
The new look for search results went into production Friday, June 6. Run a search from anywhere to to see the new look for search results.
May 6,2008. Release 3.1.008 implementation follow-up, UI redesign implementation
Final testing of the new UI happens here
The new release of Northern Light, version 3.1.008, was implemented overnight April 30, 2008, and is now in production. We are now performing final testing of the long-awaited redesigned user interface. Please use the URL above for all user testing.
Highlights of the new user interface include:
- Expandable left sidebar in results now includes folders (for better visibility), mini-advanced search, Google and FirstGov search, and helpful links.
- Agency-wide search now excludes PDF files by default. The user can easily choose to include PDF
- Multi-collection support, so we can index key areas more frequently
- Spellchecker enhanced so it will not suggest words for which we have no results, but will accept these words if valid.
- Upgraded filtering of extended character-set to reduce undisplayable characters in title and description
April 24,2008. Migration to new Northern Light release scheduled for Monday, April 28
EPA release notes for NLESE v3.1.008
This release should make ranking for common queries better, a lot better for queries of more than one word. More changes are in store soon, when we release the new version of the user interface. See the release notes for more details on this release.
March 31,2008. Please help us to test Northern Light release 3.1.
Test the new Northern Light release
We think the ranking works better with version than the version in productionxs, so we want to move this into production, independently of implementing the new UI. Specifically, we think ranking of common multi-word queries work a lot better. What do you think?
February 26,2008. The current version of the redesigned search results.
New search results
This includes the new sidebar with extended search features. Note that the default for EPA search is now "web pages" only, which means HTML. The default for Area search will continue to be all documents.
This is the development server for search, which is running version 3.1.008 of Northern Light
February 26,2008. Presentations from Web Work Group Training Conference, Winter 2008.
Why is EPA Search So Hard? (MS PowerPoint, 399K) Stay tuned for our sequel, Search Hard with a Vengeance.
State of Search (MS PowerPoint, 614K)
November 6,2007. New search features all on one page.
New search features page
Auto-suggest, spellchecker and redesigned results.
November 6,2007. Upgraded spell-checker.
Spell-check search
Updated dictionary, with place names, and local terminology. Doesn't blow up on Chatham County towns, either - nice!
September 24,2007. New version of query log reports rolled out.
Public access Agency-wide query logs
Public access query logs by TSSMS
Intranet Agency-wide query logs
Intranet query logs by TSSMS
Use these reports to see what people are searching for on your site. You can view the top queries overall for each month for your area, or for the entire EPA. You can also view the top queries that returned no results (useful for spotting alternative language, or common misspellings). If you have any questions, contact Peter Buch.
New tool for managing web aliases rolled out.
http://www.epa.gov/cgi-bin/SPA/selectalias
The new tool to view web aliases for your area, and detect and resolve conflicts is now available. This is more exciting than it sounds. Please send your comments to Karen Litwin.
Followup from WWG Training Conference August 20-23, 2007
http://intranet.epa.gov/webgroup/taxonomy/Metadata.htm
Susan Fagan presented on newly released search folders and the taxonomy project. Visit the link above for more about the EPA Web Taxonomy that is the basis for folders.
Try out the new search autosuggest feature
http://nlquery.epa.gov/epasearch/searchutils/autosuggest.html
Type two or more letters into the search box on this sample page, and see a list of suggested queries.
Participate in the search folders test!
http://nlquery.epa.gov/epasearch/searchutils/folders.html
Help us improve the folders search feature by testing the search and providing us with feedback on helpful the folders were in locating the most search results most relevant to your needs.
EPA Resources
Test pages
http://nlquery.epa.gov/webmast/testpages.html
Do you want to customize the search for your area? Maybe want to add more power to the search but would like to know what the results will look like or how to code it? Here's a listing of all the different features you can use and ways to program your search form on your area.
Utilities
http://nlquery.epa.gov/webmast/utils.html
Would you like to know what users searched for the most on the EPA Web site? Would you like to know this for your area? How about the number of search queries entered into the EPA search engine in a day or month? Would you like to know how fast the search engine returns results? Take a look at all these spiffy utilities to help you and the Search Engine Webmasters gauge search performance.
Search Help on the Web Guide
http://yosemite.epa.gov/OEI/webguide.nsf/searchengine
Need to implement a search form? Would you like some step-by-step instructions on how to do this? Visit the Web Guide for detailed instructions on how to implement search on your area.
Search Conversion
For the Intranet: http://intranet.epa.gov/webmast3/nlconversion/
For Public Access: http://www.epa.gov/webmast1/nlconversion/
Have you converted your search form from Verity to Northern Light? If you're not sure, visit these pages to find out how many of your pages are converted and how many aren't. This tool will also identify the URLs of these pages so you can find them quickly should you need to edit your search form code.
Resources Outside of the EPA
Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/ 
Do you need to know more about how search engines work? Want the latest news on how people use search effectively? Need tips and hints on crafting search to suit your needs? Just want to be search-geek and know all there is know about search? This site has news, tips, discussion forums, expert advice, and basic search introductory content to help you with a variety of needs.
Sitemaps.org
http://sitemaps.org/
Would you like to understand XML sitemaps better? Need help implementing one? This site covers the basics of developing XML sitemaps.