Early this decade, the number of Web-based documents stored on the servers of the University of Florida hovered near 300,000. By the end of 2006, that number had leapt to four million. Two years later, the university hosts close to eight million Web documents. Web sites for colleges and universities everywhere have become repositories for data sheets, meeting minutes, course-management and research materials, and various other digital artifacts. To help people find what they are looking for in increasingly large, disorderly digital vaults, many colleges are replacing homegrown search technology with more powerful commercial equipment. Search-engine giant Google has marketed its Google Search Appliance to many colleges and universities, including Florida, since it introduced the product in 2002. Other companies, such as Thunderstone Software, are competing as well, but name-recognition and features like hinting, spell-correct, and advanced search, drive expectations and make it difficult to out-perform the product that has become a verb synonymous with Web search.