[Search-l] Coop - Custom search engine

[Christian Ledermann]

Hi all,

After there have been some discussions about social bookmarking, tagging
and sitesearch I liked to add my 2 cents.

pulling all of the above together could evolve in a vertical search
engine pretty much like google custom search (cse or google coop).

short description (for those who do not know cse):

You may limit the search to predefined sites, add labels (keywords) by
which you may refine your search, add weighs to sites ...

shortcomings of google coop: if you add more than 3 sites your search
results get quaint (i.e they do not really get sorted in the way google
scores them but rather randomly - this behaviour is documented somewhere
but hard to find) so it is not really usable. Anyway lots of people use
it and are doing work for google categorizing sites and other users
cannot even see what sites are used to make up that search engines.

another search engine for focused search is opencrawl.de

and  windows live, rollyo or yahoo offer similar services (with other
limitations like max 25 sites)


pros for wikia:
people are selfish so if they see an (immediate) benefit for them they
will be much more likely to contribute links, keywords and descriptions.

to have an up to date index people would be more likely to contribute
indexers for 'their sites'

pros for users:
have a usable search over multiple sites, and of course all the benefits
wikia search has.



implementation thoughts:

a user registers a bookmark collections / custom searcher where he can
add tag and organize his bookmarks in categories/ folders.

have a simple exchange protocol for up/dowloading bookmarks like XBEL
(that is why categories/folders come in handy) there are already
products for firefox which do this - so no reinventing the wheel.


for integration in an external site: javascript and/or opensearch -
rss/atom



-- 
Best Regards,

Christian Ledermann