Tuesday, August 18, 2026

A lot of Western universities have a lousy website search function

This is incredible in the second quarter of the 21st century! I notice it again and again when I frequently visit various university websites. 

Maybe these universities are relying too much on Google Search to substitute for their lousy website search function! Unfortunately, Google Search has its flaws too when it comes to content from Western universities.

Often, the search results are undated!

It is not obvious how the search results were selected or how they were sorted.

An option to sort the search results by e.g. recency is often missing (see e.g. example below)

Here is an example: University of Manchester. I searched for bilayer graphene, because very recently Physical Review X journal published an article from researchers of University of Manchester. 



Stanford University



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