New Starter - Chris Marsh

I've just started in the Digital team as a Front-end Web Developer - writing HTML, CSS and Javascript. My background is working for web agencies, developing sites and delivering to clients. It will be a huge change to work on a single website, but I'm looking forward to it.

We've got huge plans for updating the design, structure and deployment of the UoY website, and I've got a lot of ideas about the role the Digital team will play in this exciting new phase.

I'm an alumnus of the University, although it's nearly 15 years since I graduated. It's great to be back and I'm looking forward to getting reacquainted with life on campus.

Our new search engine

You may have noticed that searching on the University website has become a lot better recently. This is down to the fact that we launched our new search engine this week, replacing our old Google Mini solution with Funnelback.

What's new?

While we've kept the design of the search mostly the same as it was before, a lot has changed behind the scenes that means that search results should be more relevant and come back a lot quicker. The new search is a lot better at dealing with misspellings - of which we see a lot in our search logs, especially when it comes to words like 'accommodation', which is spelled incorrectly as many times as it's spelled correctly. 

A couple of our favourite new features include:

Autocomplete

As soon as you start typing your query you'll see suggestions for searches that match content on our site.

This currently is only enabled for searches carried out from york.ac.uk/search, but we'll soon be adding it to search boxes on the rest of the site too.

Document type filtering

If you know that you're looking for a file of a particular type, the document filter on the right hand side will allow you to narrow down your search.