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Looking for Galaxy (info), in all the right places

Which are dangerously close to the wrong places...

Ever search for "Galaxy" on Google, or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo!? Well, if you are interested in phones, astronomy, soccer, cars*, chocolate, or Ansible (ok, that last one is close), then you are in luck. But, if you are interested in the one true Galaxy then the pickings are pretty thin.

There are many lessons here:

  1. Don't name your project with a widely used word.
  2. Don't name your project with a widely used word.
  3. Don't name your project with a widely used word.
  4. Don't name your project with a widely used word.
  5. Don't use a general search tool when searching for information about a so named project.

Fortunately there is a solution to lesson #5: The Pan-Galactic Search is a custom Google search engine that searches only websites related to our Galaxy. It is available at the top of every page on the Galaxy Community Hub.

Here, as an example, are the top hits when you search for "Galaxy search":

Searching for Galaxy Search

The search further classifies results by where they are found and what they are likely to be relevant to. The tabs are

  • All results: Show's all search results.
  • Use: Results from sites that are likely to be more relevant to using Galaxy.
  • Admin/Dev: Results that are relevant for deploying, administering, and extending Galaxy.
  • Shared: Histories, workflows, pages and visualizations that have been shared by other Galaxy users.
  • Discussion: Results from support forums, mailing lists, and chats.
  • Hub: Shows only information that is located on the this web site, the Galaxy Community Hub.
  • Tools: Results about tools available in the Galaxy ecosystem.
  • Code: Results about the Galaxy source code.
  • Requests: Results about bug reports and feature requests.

The Galaxy Publication Search tab searches the Galaxy Publication Library using Zotero's built in search. It will show you publications relevant to your search. (It's not integrated into the Google search because Google doesn't want to search collections of material available elsewhere on the web.)

Happy searching,
Dave Clements

* Or the infinitely more interesting Galaxie 500 (which was also my very first car).

1969 Ford Galaxy 500 4 door hardtop: 19 feet of family sedan.