October 08, 2007
OpenLearn Custom Search
Chatting to a member of the OpenLearn team last week, a comment was made about the state of OpenLearn search. I have to admit, I don't search the site directly that often, though when I do it's often via a Grazr widget that consumes a feed from a Dapper application that scrapes the results from the OU search results page (Search OpenLearn Anywhere).
It would be handy if the OU search engine produced an OpenSearch feed, but then again, maybe working on the results quality would be handy too.
Anyway, it didn't take long at all to produce a Google Custom Search over the OpenLearn domain, with refinements to let you tunnel in to results from the unit descriptions, unit content, unit forums, and so on.
[I've added a "feeds" limit since I too that screenshot which also lets you refine the search results to just contain feed URLs.]
I haven't produced a skin or landing page for the app yet, but you can try it here: OpenLearn CSE Demo.
I'm not sure that a topic based search would be that useful? At the moment, I think that units are allocated to one and only one topic area, which for a subject like Babylonian Mathematics is confusing (is it a Maths unit or a an Arts and History one?).
PS I notice that the OpenLearn topic feeds appear to be capped at twenty items, which means they don't necessarily list all the units in a topic?
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Posted by ajh59 at October 8, 2007 11:00 AMHi Tony,
I've had a look into this and when I open the RSS inside either Firefox or IE 7 they display all the correct data for the given topic.
The only thing I can think of is that whichever feed reader you're using is set to display [x] items.
Can you check this and get back to me with your findings.
Thanks,
James Brisland
OpenLearn