Someone recently told me that they use the Google Custom Search Engine tool provided by Google to create search engines for searching many of their highly researched resources online. They do it to search that particular website using the of course the world’s best search tool, Google! Another situation for me of course where the light bulb went on upstairs when I thought about the countless times I had tried using a search tool on a website to find particular information. What was I doing? Why not use Google and it’s algorithm to find what I was looking for? You can see where I made the connection.

Where I find this particularly helpful for me is with open source project type of websites such as Drupal.org, Wordpress.org etc. I am constantly searching those websites all the time for information. It’s part of what I do. Another example I could see this useful in is a sports journalist who needs to be able to quickly grab statistics on an athlete from ESPN.com or NFL.com. You get the idea?

The way it works is you go to google.com/coop/cse/ and with your google account, create a free custom search engine. You enter the domain(s) that you want your COOP to search. In the following examples case, I wanted my COOP to search the entire domain of Ubercart.org. It then gave me a special URL for my COOP which I “dragged” onto my bookmarks in my Firefox browser. That way I could easily access it at anytime I needed it.

I have found this method of research to be very very helpful for me. It has definitely improved and sped up my research time and cut away many many wasted hours in trying to find specific information.