At the risk of blowing Phil Barker's trumpet for him (!), the latest CETIS newsletter mentions a blog post of his at:
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/philb/2011/01/20/google-custom-search-for-ukoer/
on creating a Google Custom Search Engine to pick up 'ukoer' in known OER sites (eg Open Jorum, Flickr, Leeds Met OER repository). It's a nice quick and dirty application, and having created Google CSEs for other sites I can testify that it's fairly wash 'n' go. However, one thing I can't quite twig in Phil's post is the following:
" where the URL pattern doesn't lead only to content that is UKOER the term '+UKOER' added to the search terms entered by the user."
Can Phil, or anyone else who's tried this out, explain how you can add this string to the user search terms? I can't see anything in the Google CSE control panel that would allow this, and putting the string at the end of a URL just gets an 'invalid url' error. I did leave a comment on the blog but it's not even been moderated yet so I thought I might get a quicker response on here.
I've put up a very basic test implementation at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ntzfr/oer/google_cse_ukoer.php but would hope to refine it into a usable search engine for teaching staff.
While I'm on the topic, are there any other tools out there which allow users to search for OER content? I'm aware of OER Commons, XPERT and other searchable directories (some listed at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~ntzfr/oer/providers.php) and they're all good in their own ways, but an adaptable/customisable end-user tool would be handy, if such exists. (My colleague Mike Taylor is working on a resource aggregator which is at an alpha stage, though has considerable promise.)
Cheers
Fred
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