A: Most sites in the .tamu.edu domain should be in the index. If you have not seen a search return from your site you can try the form below. Simply put your site name into the form field and hit "Enter." If your site is in the index it should be immediately visible in the search return.

A: The search spider should catch any site that is linked from another site that has been already indexed. If the spider has not picked up your site, or if you need it added right away, contact the webmaster's office and we can add it directly to the crawl list.

A: You can have a URL removed by emailing the A&M Webmasters with your request and we will add it to our "Do Not Crawl" URL patterns list. The site will then be removed by the system the next time it begins a scheduled crawl. If the files should be removed right away please let us know. We can remove access to them even before they fall out of the index.

A: The Google appliance is set on "continuous crawl," meaning that as soon as it finishes one round of indexing it starts over and recrawls campus. In general it takes several days for a complete crawl to finish, so your site should be visited no more than a few times per week.

A: The search engine will recognize your content as new the next time is crawls your site. If you wish to force an update of the search index, please contact the webmaster's office and request the update.

A: The default rate of spidering is 4 hits per second per site. This is adjustable on per-server basis, though. Please contact us if you wish to have the spidering rate adjusted on your server. If you notice hundreds or thousands of hits from the search spider it might indicate a "black hole" on your site where the spider gets thrown into a perpetual loop. If you think this is occurring either contact us or set up robots.txt files to prevent the spider from searching the problematic pages.

A: Yes, if you have a properly formatted sitemap file the Google Search Appliance should recognize and act on it. Information on how to create and use sitemaps is available on Google's Webmaster Support documentation site.