Webmasters, and others maintaining information within the University, need to understand more about how our search service is provided than do other users. The search service is actually provided by one or other of a pair of servers running the Funnelback search software (and accessed via the web user-interface on search.cam.ac.uk. Another server is used for test and development work (and does not provide any public facilities, though it may be seen in web server logs making requests to websites).
All the web-crawling (fetching pages from websites) and index-building is done by one of the pair of live servers and the other handles search requests received via search.cam.ac.uk. The indexing server has copies of the latest search index files so that it can take over handling search requests temporarily, if that is required.
The choice of which Funnelback server to use is made by search.cam.ac.uk, depending on their availability. The test/development server does similar web-crawling and indexing, though on a much smaller scale.
User-Agent strings
The User-Agent string used by the Funnelback servers in their HTTP(S) requests to websites is
University of Cambridge search (search-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk)
Last updated: April 2021