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Building a search engine on development using Google Coop
On the e-collaboration blog I have posted a video interview of 4 minutes with Michel Wesseling about his efforts to build FOCUSS, a specialised search engine for development. Though he started with the idea to develop a new search engine, they have changed to use Google Coop instead. One of the interview questions:
What are challenges to make FOCUSS work?
You'd expect that developing the technology is a challenge but the biggest challenge, however, is to get people to work together. To stimulate them to make bookmarks is the biggest challenge. So now one colleague will work one day per week on marketing and stimulating people.
To watch the video go to the blog here.
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Google Co-op
There was a talk last week at the Circuit Riders conference in the UK about how the SCIP project in Brighton set up a custom search at www.p2b.net for their town. They bought a Google box, hardware that sits by the server and enables some very clever search possibilities. They had to get a number of local organisations working together on this project: not an easy thing to do.
I just used Google Co-op to build a custom search site for the boating community in the UK. It's at www.boatr.org.uk. I found it very easy to set up and integrate into my webspace. I also quickly hooked it all up to Adsense and Google Analytics. What took longer was the research and deciding which sites should be included in the search results. I've published a list of all the indexed sites so that users can suggest ones that I've missed.
Google Co-op is such a simple but effective tool to use.