Techcrunch yesterday did a write-up on a new feature of Google called Google Co-op. Essentially, you create a custom search engine that encompasses only a smaller portion of the Internet. Instead of just using Google’s search engine to search your own site, you can have it search other sites as well. The great and neat thing about Google Co-op is that people can collaborate on the list of sites that the search engine filters for. If you want to help collaborate on this, you’re more than welcome to drop me a line at abenamer[at]nonprofittechblog.org. Use the ‘@’ symbol to replace [at]. But wait! There’s more after the jump…
I decided to create a customized Google search engine that I call “Nonprofit Technology Search-a-rama” to search nonprofit tech sites. I’ll probably expand it further to include nonprofit IT vendors and general nonprofit tech sites. Try it out! There’s a new search box in the right sidebar of this site and it now searches:
- http://www.nonprofittechblog.org
- http://nten.typepad.com/
- http://michaelatmo.blogspot.com/
- http://brianglass.blogs.com/
- http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog
- http://www.todayicried.com/
- http://www.zenofnptech.org
This would be great for non-profits that like to direct donors who are becoming autodidacts in their philanthropy. A homeless organization can create a search engine devoted only to issues of homelessness, etc.
By the way, Google Co-op has a few technical glitches for those of us who tend to use database-driven search engines whose templates show pages that are served based on a query string, i.e. WordPress. It’s not easy to integrate into WordPress and after about 30 minutes of struggling I gave up. This is because the search data is passed into Google and then Google, in turn, redirects the user back to your original search page page. In that process, all query strings that are necessary for WordPress to process are lost by Google. This means no customized pages using a theme unless you’re willing to build a static page containing your theme and inserting Google’s search result in there. It’s an awkward workaround and one I’m unwilling to try for now.
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Upon checking this out, three features stood out:
1) You can exclude sites that you do not want in the results
2) You can easily do so using the Google Marker
3) Anyone can volunteer to help
So we decided to throw up an experiment to encourage everyone to mark spam sites to be excluded from search results.
Working together as a community we may be able to radically improve the quality of the search results (or perhaps just get in a blacklisting war?)
The result is Putch – http://www.putch.com
I just did a test run, searching for my favorite subject of the moment “Raiser’s Edge” and I the first 4 pages are almost exclusively from Blackbaud. When you search via Google normally do you not see the “More pages like this” link under Blackbaud’s entry rather than every single page on their website.
I was hoping to find references to sites other than Blackbaud’s, to see what people had written on their software but all I get is Blackbaud.
I guess I could put the -Blackbaud switch in and see what I get.
David
David Zeidman
Zeidman Development
http://www.zeidman.info
David,
Were you referring to the Putch search engine or the Search-a-rama? Either one is full of Blackbaud.com links. What’s too bad is that we can’t dictate the order in which the results are returned. I’d love to be able to push the more independent sites and blogs up first in the search array and THEN show the Blackbaud.com results.
I like the Putch idea too. A better Google — I’m sure Google would like that but I fear that spam sites are way too easily code-generated and that mere people would never be able to catch up.
As mentioned in the TechCrunch piece, this is just like Rollyo (http://rollyo.com/), which I have been using for a while. It is from blogger Dave Pell, who has re-launched his daily newsletter Davenetics (www.davenetics.com), which I highly recommend. Rollyo has Yahoo’s search engine behind it, and he already has a pretty interesting set of custom search engines worth checking out.
I was refering to Search-a-rama. The putch entry was not there when I wrote mine (time difference thing must have thrown WordPress).
Like the idea a lot though. It would be good to weight the sites though.
David
David Zeidman
Zeidman Development
http://www.zeidman.info
Last weekend I set up a Google Co-op site: a custom search for the boating community in the UK. It’s at http://www.boatr.org.uk.
It took only a few hours to set up co-op, integrate it into my webspace and incorporate Google Analytics and Adsense.
The research into which websites to include took longer but I asked visitors what’s missing and have had about 50 more sites suggested, maing a total of over 170 so far.
I’m getting good feedback and am thinking about which other communities of interest I could do this for.
It does have a few awkward characteristics and there’s a limit to how much the look and style of it can be customised; but the more I keep it looking like Google the easier users will find it anyway.
Interested to see you had trouble integrating it into WordPress because that would have been my next step!
I am also going to be using it on a little start-up I’m working on.I think its marvaleous but Also I had to lie! to get no ads later.