John Pederson points to Google Co-op. Basically a build your own do it yourself search engine. John points out some educational uses including dumping your list of search links into Google Co-op and making the list of vetted web sites into a custom search tool using Google as the front end. For example a teacher who has researched and found appropriate sites for her students to visit could create a Google Co-op search tool that returned search results from those specific sites only. There is also a collaborate feature that allows you to invite others to edit and add to your custom search tool.

Below is an example I threw together this morning. It returns search results from several kid friendly search sites. I’ve invited our technology teacher, Tony Jamesbarry to also edit the tool with me, and anticipate sharing it with staff later this week.

One nice feature is that non-profits can turn off adwords, so the results returned are free of advertisements. Also there are tools for customizing the look of the search box and easy cut and paste javascript for including the search box in your own web page.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.