A casual user can visit INDURE, type a string in the search box, and click on the SUBMIT button. Within a few seconds INDURE displays a list of faculty that match the typed string. The list is arranged in the order of best match.

The search string could be (partial) name of a faculty member, a keyword, or a research area.

To constrain the search to a participating university, select the university from the filter on the top right of the page prior to initiating the search.

Sometimes it might help to improve the search results by searching for alternatives. For example, when searching for "plastics" you might also try "polymer" or "composite."

Each entry on the displayed list contains a numerical score to its left. This score indicates the relative strength of the match for that faculty with the string typed.

The number on the left of each entry in the search results indicates the relative strength of the match of that faculty member's expertise with the keyword(s) typed in the search box. Higher number means better match.

INDURE uses two search engines, one developed at Purdue University by the research group of Professor Luo Si and the other by engineers at Humanizing Technologies. These two engines use different algorithms to conduct the search. The search scores returned by the two engines are added to obtain a single numerical score. This numerical score is used to rank the search results for display.

For each faculty member in the INDURE database, the two search engines attempt to match keywords, research areas, text available at the specified URL, the title and description of any dissertations that this faculty member might have advised, and their publications found on the Web. Obviously, the more the data available in a faculty record, the better are the chances that this faculty member will apear higher among the search results. Note that all faculty in the participating universities have the ability to log into INDURE and update their individual record.