[Web4lib] Re: Google Search Appliance and OPACs

[Casey Bisson]

On Feb 10, 2008, at 10:02 PM, Edward Spodick wrote:

> [...]as someone else alluded to, many ILS systems, including both  
> the III and VuFind implementations, suffer from using a generic  
> TITLE tag in the HEAD of the html - to the title tag, which is used  
> for displaying Google search results, will just be something like  
> the following for every record.
> 	"Hong Kong University of Science and Technology"
> 	"Library Resource Finder: Record Holdings"
> Not very useful when what the user would want would probably be the  
> title of the item.
>
> The Scriblio implementation does a better job on this aspect, at  
> least in our implementation, with things like
> "HKUST Library Catalog » Japanese popular music : culture,  
> authenticity, and power"
> as http://catalog.ust.hk/catalog/archives/710731

Not only that, but you can change how it's represented in the theme.  
Some WordPress users have invested serious time into thinking about  
how those things should work; the default Scriblio theme follows the  
conventions set by other WordPress default themes, but there's no  
reason you can't make changes.


> So while I do plan to explore the Sitemap method of exposing these  
> permanent links, until [the page title metadata] is fixed the  
> results in search engines may not appear too useful.

You can also use the WordPress sitemap plugin to do that. I've not  
tried it yet (and you might find it's not coded to handle nearly 1  
million records your collection has), but here's a link:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/