Personalised and Community Search
I’m not sure if anyone else has tried out the beta ‘Coop’ facility recently announced by Google.
Dave Briggs has used this to set up a federated/personalised search engine – LGSEARCH – for searching across all local government web sites.
I think this is an excellent demonstration of how the technolgy can be used to obtain more relevant results by restricting search to trusted or authoratitive sites. Something I’d already included in the next set of requirements for the IDeA’s Communities of Practice site but without knowing what the solution was. I think this could be it! My thanks to Dave for demonstrating what is possible.
3 thoughts on “Personalised and Community Search”
Steve – thanks for the links and the positive views. I’d have thought Google Coop would work fine with your platform. I’d actually like to have a chat at some point about some of the ways I was considering expanding LGSearch – effectively into LGNewmedia, with wikis, blogs, podcasts, video and forums and stuff – but this might be straying into some areas where you are working and I don’t want to stretch the interest there is in this stuff too far.
Do drop me an email sometime and we can run through it all.
Thanks again
Dave
Response to Dave Briggs:
Thanks for comments – sounds like you’r doing some interesting things. Also just picked up your item about the Shropshire CC blog. Good to see that there are some enlightened coucils, though agree with your comments about Lotus Notes. Will drop you an email to discuss common areas of interest.
Steve
From our ‘great minds thinking alike’ file… just to say I’ve unleashed something very similar in the past few days. I’ve registered http://www.findless.co.uk, and so far we’ve got two ‘engines’ built: http://safety.findless.co.uk (for the health and safety business) and http://education.findless.co.uk (covering the DfES ecosystem). Having worked the technology out, it should be easy enough to spin off other subject-specific engines. Feedback so far has been very positive, with more than one ‘I wish this had come along ages ago’ – what does that say about the general state of search in UK government circles? (Don’t answer that…)