Setting Up a Google Co-op Search
Learners are increasingly being asked to go online to look for information in addition to the content provided in their courseware. One big criticism of this method is that the search results may lead the participants to off-topic sites. The latest offering from Google is a cooperative search engine where you can create a customized search engine that searches within a pre-select set of sites that deal with your focus area.
Some examples listed on Google’s co-op search page. The first search engine searches within sites related to Macintosh computers and the second limits the searches within sites dealing with economics.
Here is an example from Globalvoicesonline site. You can search within Global Voices editor’s blogroll.
Building your own co-op search engine
Start with the webpage www.google.com/coop/ . You will need to have a google account in order to go further. You can create one if you don’t have one on this page.
Click on the create a search engine button.
Type in the name you want to give to your search engine. I am making a search engine that searches within elearning sites so I am going to call my search engine “Elearning News Search”. Just below the name I type in the description of my search engine “Latest happenings in e-learning from top e-learning sites and blogs”
Next you will have to enter some keywords related to your search topics. I added keywords such as - elearning, knowledge management, instructional design.
The next block asks you to enter the sites that you would be searching. I have pasted about a dozen or so e-learning sites that i regularly refer too. This list can be modified later on.
You can specify if your search engine is going to search only within the sites listed above or search the whole web but with more emphasis on the sites listed above.
You can set if you want friends or strangers add to the list of sites that you are looking at.
If you are ok with Google’s terms of service, you may click on the next button.
On the next page, you can click on the finish button to generate your own customized search engine.
If at any point, you want to modify the settings of your search engine, click on the control panel link.
The code section in the control panel gives you a piece of HTML code that you can stick on your site to let your visitors search directly from your webpage.
December 21st, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Hi,
How accuarate are the results? How much tweaking is involved? Keep us updated!
Thanks,
Tom
January 7th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Hi, the results depends on how many sites you have fed in. I would suggest letting your trusted users add more sites to the search engine, that way it would stay uptodate.