For me, more interesting than the technology is how it’s being used. Do you have any data on how university search engines are being managed? From a user experience point of view, that is.

Even the smartest search engine can’t do it all for you, especially when you’re relying on content written by a multitude of non-specialists as most universities are.

I blogged about a collection of podcasts and resources I’ve come across recently: http://bit.ly/cIueJK. I recommend the John Ferrera presentation in particular.

1) I think that Google Search Appliance, Google Custom Search and the public Google search actually represent significantly different solutions (not least in terms of up front cost) and so the 75% ‘Google’ slice is somewhat misleading. The results of a better breakdown would be interesting.

2) I’ve always considered that Open Source has failed to deliver good web search engines because a) they are hard to write (especially if they are to work on an enterprise scale), and b) there’s a sufficiently small market for them that there isn’t a critical mass of developers.

For more information on LSE can I point your readers to the following Case Study on the Funnelback site:
http://www.funnelback.com/news-and-events/news/posts/funnelback-seminar-london-school-of-economics-case-study

And please watch this space for news on other UK Universities that are currently in-build on Funnelback!