Forcing a Google mini to show “omitted results”

Google’s motto may be “don’t be evil” but that doesn’t mean they can’t occasionally be overly helpful. Case in point our Google Mini (which serves up search results at Lafayette) was omitting results from the Library web site because it felt those results were too similar. You could still see them by forcing Google to do the search again with the results included, but who wants to do that every time?

Fortunately, you can override this behavior by adding a hidden input field to the form to disable this filtering:

  • <input type=”hidden” name=”filter” value=”0″>

This needs to be added to the search form you’re using to send queries to Google, but if you want the Google box itself to have the same behavior then you need to update its internal forms by editing the XSLT front-end for that search collection. These instructions on the Google Search Appliance Help Forum explain how.