At Princeton, it's "People" first!
I just completed my third week in a new job. I am now employed by Princeton University, serving in the role of Associate Director for External Affairs at the new Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The center is part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Networking outside of the University is a key part of my job. However, there are a lot of people - roughly 5,000 faculty and staff and close to 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students - at this place. I have had need to find people's email addresses and phone numbers as I learn my way around.
To do that, Princeton has a wonderful web search service that serves to search the University site. It can also search for people. You can even do a Google web search from there. Hence, there are 3 choices once you get to the search page.
What I find myself wanting to do most often is a "people" search. However, the default setting is to do a "Princeton.edu" search. See for yourself.
So, what happens is that I go to the search site and 9 times out of 10, I enter a name and click "Go", which results in a bunch of articles, rather than a directory of people with that name.
Well, I couldn't take it anymore and had to find out a way to change the behavior of the page. That's where Javascript comes into play; and not only that, there's Greasemonkey that lets me do it in a way that I can share it with all of you (assuming you're out there somewhere...hello? anybody there?). Ok.
First, for Greasemonkey to work for you, you have to be using the Firefox browser. If you are, you can find Greasemonkey here. If you've come this far, just follow those directions when you get there.
Once you have it, you can install my "PU People First" script, which can be found here.
Once it's installed, go ahead and reload the Princeton search page. It should now have the "Princeton people" radio button selected, instead of the "Princeton.edu" button.
I hope you find this helpful.
Update: I added a feature to the script that puts the cursor into the search box after the page loads, saving a tab to get the cursor into the field.