Local/UNL/directory search results sometimes empty

[Erin Paseka]

The "3 in 1" local/UNL/directory search is still considered viable, right? Is somebody in the process of changing how that works?

I'd like to have the "3 in 1" search work for my sites. When it first became available I couldn't get it to work in the time I could afford, so I implemented a local-only quick fix instead. Now I'm looking at this again, doing a few searches on other UNL sites to see what kind of results to expect, and the search seems surprisingly, inconsistently broken.

Examples:
- At http://www.unl.edu/ search for "chancellor" or "admission": No local result section (OK), UNL results empty, directory results OK.
- At http://cba.unl.edu/ search for "mba": Last week I jotted this down as one that was OK on all 3 parts. Today local shows only a University of Phoenix ad (yikes), UNL is empty, and the directory is OK.
- At http://www.unl.edu/iaffairs/ search for "fulbright": No results for local/UNL/directory, says "This Custom Search Engine is loading. Try again in a few seconds." Trying again minutes later does the same thing.
- At http://english.unl.edu/ search for "creative writing": Local missing, UNL empty, directory (perhaps correctly) empty.
- At http://research.unl.edu/ search for "proposal": Results OK for local/UNL/directory.
- At http://research.unl.edu/ search for "grant": Directory (probably correctly) empty, UNL empty, local says "This Custom Search Engine is loading. Try again in a few seconds." Minutes later, no change.

I've tried different browsers and different computers with the same results so I don't think it's just some odd cache thing on my end. I realize that some differences in behavior may be due to frontier vs. CMS vs. other servers, or kludges like what I did, or custom cx searches. (Sorry if I'm repeating a prior thread--the BB won't let me search for "search"!)

[caggens2]

Ours wasn't working yesterday, but it seems to be working this morning (www.unl.edu/art).

[bbieber2]

Google has deprecated the custom search engine API we're using, and limits the number of queries we're allowed per day. This caused some search queries to not show any results, depending on what google server you connected to, and whether or not we had exceeded the limit.

Right now we're looking into alternative methods, but have no immediate replacements available.

[Erin Paseka]

Thanks for the info. Guess I'll stick with what I've got, for now.