EduGlu Sandbox

In an OLDaily post last week (University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE! which picked up on a blog post of the same name by Zaid Ali Alsagoff (University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE!) and which contained a comprehensive link collection of OER and OCW sites, Stephen Downes commented: "This is a great resource - and something to spur me to create something (using RSS or something) that will aggregate and make available for search the collected resources from those sites."

So as a first, quick attempt, at that, here's a Google Custom search engine that will do just that: University Learning = OCW+OER = Free custom search engine.

This search engine will search over all the domain linked to from the original blog post. So that's a lot of work, right? Wrong - here's how it was defined:

Just provide the CSE with the URL of the link collection post, tell it to search over the sites that are linked to from that post, and that's it... (For more info about this sort of approach, see: Search Hubs and Custom Search at ILI2007).

Note that I actually pointed the CSE to a printer friendly version of the post that was linked to from the original post because the original blog page has lots of 'blog furniture' that contains many links not associated with the post and whioch would "contaminate" the list of web domains searched over by the CSE.

If you want to try the CSE out, here's the URL again: University Learning = OCW+OER = Free custom search engine.

Note that if you want to pull results from the CSE into your own page in an AJAXy sort of way, that's possible too using the Google AJAX search API. HEre's an example of how to use that API to get the search results into a Yahoo Pipes environment: Google CSE Yahoo pipe demo.

Tags: cse, search hub, oer, ocw, search