Bellevue College moves to Swiftype Site Search

On August 24 we changed the service that provides site search on the Bellevue College website. The service that we have used for many years, Google Custom Search, was discontinued by Google earlier this year. Our new service is powered by Swiftype, a widely used site search provider. We are excited to launch this new system, and hope that it will allow us to provide more relevant and dynamic results to the students and employees we serve.

As Swiftype and Google are different systems, search results may be somewhat different after this change. We will be working with Swiftype throughout the launch period to ensure that search results meet the needs of our campus; it’s very important that students and employees can find what they are looking for!

If you notice issues with the system, please submit a Service Desk ticket. This will help us improve search results over time!

Thank you for your patience and assistance as we make this change!

Updates that made this possible

Moving to Swiftype required us to update several projects that power the BC website; namely Mayflower, Mayflower Homepage, and Globals.

Along with the search updates, we also made some small tweaks to how headings are formatted, how title tags are generated, the small ad section of the BC homepage, and laid the groundwork for some new widgets in WordPress 4.8

The source code for most BC projects is open-source, and available on GitHub.

Welcome Website Managers!

I have created this Commons site as a way to update website managers on new updates to the Bellevue College website.

We are constantly working on new features, fixes, and improvements to expand what is possible in our Content Management System (CMS); I will be using the blog to update the campus community on what is available!

Most of the posts here will focus on the main BC website (www.bellevuecollege.edu), but there may be info on Commons and StudentWeb as well, as applicable.