Hi Guys,
I'm hoping that some of you can help me out with a little project that I've just started playing with. Basically I'm going to use the free tools provided by Google to make a customised search engine for shooting stuff.
Frankly I have a lot of sites that I feel are relatively good sources of info, but its very annoying to search each one individually. This could be a solution to the problem. Whilst I'm loving the speed of my new internet connection (no more 56k, YAY!!!), I'm getting sick of having to wade through a metric f*** tonne of irrelevant or poorly focused results everytime I search for something in google.
Some of the advantages with a custom engine:
1. It can be easily installed and distributed to anyone with a Google Account and then you can install it on your iGoogle Homepage.
2. You can make it search only specific sites (or pages of sites).
3. You can alter how it works (i.e. only search specific sites, or sites all sites but emphasis results from specific sites).
4. You can make custom refinements. So say you search for "Remington 700 308" once the search results come up you can click on the custom made refinement links to do things (such as include/exclude certain sites, search only certain sites etc). So in the case of our search you could have a refinement labelled 'reviews' and associate it only with sites that provide reviews or another label with 'handloads' which takes results only from handloading websites...etc
Anyway it will take a bit of work to build something useful. Most of the work is in sourcing and 'judging' the sites so you can emphasis their results. In other words, you only want to search or emphasis sites with quality information. This is where I'm hoping people can help out.
If there is a site (or sites) that you just can't live without because of their excellent info, please throw a link in this thread so I can add it to the search engine, or if you have some suggestions on how to categorise the refinements etc then please contribute.
I'm no software whiz so if others want to play around and make their own heres the starting points:
1. Get yourself a Google account and sign into iGoogle:
www.google.com/ig
2. Start learning about creating custom searches:
http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/start.html#hello
(scroll down a little, or else Crtl+F and search for 'Creating a Custom Search Engine').
One final tip, you have to sign into your google account to use iGoogle. Easiest to enable cookies so you don't have to do it all the time. Also I'm now using the LastPass addon for Firefox which can log you in automatically to specified sites whenever it comes across one that needs logging into.
I'll post a link to the thing once i've it got to a useful standard and a decent database of links. So please people, dump your bookmarks and hit me with your favourite sites...
I'm hoping that some of you can help me out with a little project that I've just started playing with. Basically I'm going to use the free tools provided by Google to make a customised search engine for shooting stuff.
Frankly I have a lot of sites that I feel are relatively good sources of info, but its very annoying to search each one individually. This could be a solution to the problem. Whilst I'm loving the speed of my new internet connection (no more 56k, YAY!!!), I'm getting sick of having to wade through a metric f*** tonne of irrelevant or poorly focused results everytime I search for something in google.
Some of the advantages with a custom engine:
1. It can be easily installed and distributed to anyone with a Google Account and then you can install it on your iGoogle Homepage.
2. You can make it search only specific sites (or pages of sites).
3. You can alter how it works (i.e. only search specific sites, or sites all sites but emphasis results from specific sites).
4. You can make custom refinements. So say you search for "Remington 700 308" once the search results come up you can click on the custom made refinement links to do things (such as include/exclude certain sites, search only certain sites etc). So in the case of our search you could have a refinement labelled 'reviews' and associate it only with sites that provide reviews or another label with 'handloads' which takes results only from handloading websites...etc
Anyway it will take a bit of work to build something useful. Most of the work is in sourcing and 'judging' the sites so you can emphasis their results. In other words, you only want to search or emphasis sites with quality information. This is where I'm hoping people can help out.
If there is a site (or sites) that you just can't live without because of their excellent info, please throw a link in this thread so I can add it to the search engine, or if you have some suggestions on how to categorise the refinements etc then please contribute.
I'm no software whiz so if others want to play around and make their own heres the starting points:
1. Get yourself a Google account and sign into iGoogle:
www.google.com/ig
2. Start learning about creating custom searches:
http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/start.html#hello
(scroll down a little, or else Crtl+F and search for 'Creating a Custom Search Engine').
One final tip, you have to sign into your google account to use iGoogle. Easiest to enable cookies so you don't have to do it all the time. Also I'm now using the LastPass addon for Firefox which can log you in automatically to specified sites whenever it comes across one that needs logging into.
I'll post a link to the thing once i've it got to a useful standard and a decent database of links. So please people, dump your bookmarks and hit me with your favourite sites...
