Jan. 28, 2022: Website updates

This week's updates focused on improving search. 

The development team has been hard at work ensuring search user experience is improved and the overall search process is streamlined.

The user experience changes include: 

• Changing the filter buttons from radio (circular) buttons to checkboxes.
  • This change gives the user a more visual cue of what the filtered options are.

The overall search changes include:

• Updating the 404 page to use Azure Site Search results as suggested items.
  • This update means that 404 or "not results found" page will now include web page suggestions where the requested web page name is used as a search keyword.

• Adding a weighting function to the search index fields to better match search results with the intended outcome from searchers.
  • This change creates a hierarchy in the search results to show certain types of content at the top such as program and department pages.
• Improvements to search by allowing results to be sorted by categories, tags, departments, and concentrations using keywords.
  • These improvements provide a better search experience, allowing users to more quickly find what they're looking for and narrowing search results.

View the full list of website updates here.