Mashups and Customized Search Engines

Here's a link to a presentation I gave recently (well, on Friday) on mashups and CSEs. Some interesting examples are linked from the site, and a few work in progress efforts of my own. Check it out: http://www.users.muohio.edu/burkejj/mashups.html

Quick CSE Search Update

I know it's been a while since my last post. Here is a quick update on my CSE topic (see below). Bill Drew (SUNY - Morrisville) posted the following Google search which results in CSEs that are related to libraries or librarians in some way: http://tinyurl.com/39hco7 will get you there.

It doesn't include my still-in-progress Ohio academic library CSE, and others may also be left out, but it's an intersteing look at what people are doing with this in libraryland.

A CSE attempt

As a follow-up to my post on CSEs, I have created one (almost two, but I haven't had the time to finish the other). I set up a CSE that searches the websites of Ohio's twenty-three regional campuses. I know what you're thinking: "how can I advertise on this search engine?" 8-) Is this a useful thing? Will this help anyone? Why would I make my own search engine? Well, I am trying to answer all of these questions, and I am about to announce this search engine to a wider group of people to see what might come of it. I'll let you know. Oh, and if you'd like to see it yourself -- here it is: Ohio Regional Campus Search.

So what is a CSE, anyway?

There has been a bit of discussion lately on whether or not enough librarians have been blogging about the relatively new Google Co-op project (http://www.google.com/coop/), which gives users a chance to create Custom Search Engines (CSE). In response, I thought it was time for me to say a little something about CSE and the opportunity they present for libraries and library users.

CSE's have the potential of creating more focused, topical searches of the Google database. The CSE creator (anyone can play) chooses URLs to include in the search. What you end up with can be a search engine limited to sites that you expect will return great results on your topic. And, as you create the CSE, you can still choose to include general Google results in your CSE results (but with primacy given to your chosen URLs).

An example of a CSE is David Rothman's "Consumer Health and Patient Information Search Engine" (http://davidrothman.net/consumer-health-and-patient-education-information-search-engine). It's a great collection of sites, pretty well fine-tuned to provide health and medical information for the average Joe from respected government agency and health organization sites.

A potential fear to have here is that, since you are choosing the sites, you might miss out on information on sites that are unknown to you or from newly created sites. One man's focus is another man's having blinders on, I guess. Anyone who has used Google knows that searching the full swath, even with a well constructed search and the relevancy sorting of the search engine, can be improved on. This might be a good start. I'm going to give it a try, and I'll post my results here.