With about 22,000 students, De Anza College is one of the largest and highest rated community colleges in northern California. Due to state budget cuts in education, we were forced to move the majority of our campus information and communications online in order to save money. As a result, De Anza’s website contains volumes of information about academic departments, admissions and registration procedures, program offerings and student services, with updates made daily.
Even with a refined global template and navigation system, it was a daunting task for students and staff to locate and keep track of all of this new information. Instead of navigating the website, users frequently turned to calling our campus administration department to get answers to their questions, taxing a relatively small department that had many other responsibilities.
We saw search as a potential solution to this information access problem and chose the Google Mini because of its superior search relevance, as we knew that users would once again call the administration department if their searches didn’t yield the results they were looking for. When we implemented the Google Mini, we saw the number of searches skyrocket on our site, as people realized that search was the most efficient way to find the information they were looking for. We now have an average of 1,000 searches per hour, and the number of “I can’t find it” comments that we’ve received have virtually disappeared. So our administration department is actually able to focus on their core responsibilities.
We’ve also worked to customize the Mini to make it more useful for our campus. In order to make it easier to search specific areas of our site, we’ve used the Mini’s collections feature to create a Search Center that enables users to search “Administrations & Registration,” “Financial Aid,” and “Faculty Web Sites,” among other specialized content sources. In addition, we’ve used the Mini’s KeyMatch functionality to promote specific information and activities to our users via the search results page, including course registration deadlines, course grade information, campus policies, news and events (such as the “Night of Magic” annual fundraiser), and other targeted information.
Overall, we’re extremely pleased with our Google Mini implementation and believe that it’s the best way to help our students, faculty, staff, and community find information while increasing the productivity of our administration department.
Contact Google to get on the path to search superstardom.
