OUseful Info

OU Search Engine Side By Side with Google...

On Friday, I was at an OU Library Futures workshop, scoping areas and issues for Library strategy and planning to 2012. (As at ILI2007, I'm not sure how well it goes down when I mention the things Google and the other public web search engines can do? ;-)

Anyway, one of the things that I'd said was how broken the OU search engines seems to be, at times, which was why I tend to search the public OU pages using site: limits (knowing subdomains can help, here ;-) and some of the other internal search engines.

I did promise to a colleague that I'd try and pull out some examples of where Google maybe more effective than our own search engine (like this classic example, for example;-), but I'm way behind on things to do this week already, so I built a little tool that hopefully encourage some others to post their favourite OU search engine failures ;-)

All it is, is a side by side display of OU search results and Google search results limited to the open.ac.uk domain. I probably should have produced a Google Custom search engine with a few refinements, e.g. to mirror the tabs on the OU search results page, but that's left for another coffee break (or as an exercise for the reader, maybe?)

Here's a screenshot...

...and here's a link: OU and Google "site:open.ac.uk" searches, side-by-side.

If you want to bookmark searches, there's a simple "URL API" of sorts; for example, here's a search on search engine: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/ousearchways.php?q=search%20engine.

PS for any new readers of this blog from ILI2007, that's a good example of a throwaway, twenty minute app I get the urge to build and post about most days via OUseful.Info ;-)

Tags: search, quality

Posted by ajh59 at October 10, 2007 12:38 PM