[X] My Assistant

[helvick]

Google have significantly improved their Google Co-Op tagged\focussed search capability at some stage recently so that it is now a lot better. I gave it a twirl to see what it could do and created a UMSF themed (but not restricted) Co-Op search page by pulling out a small subset of my bookmarks:

Space Flight and Exploration Search

At the moment the basic search includes the following:
www.unmannedspaceflight.com
ntrs.nasa.gov
orca.phys.uvic.ca
www.lpl.arizona.edu
pubs.giss.nasa.gov
athena1.cornell.edu
www.spacedaily.com
www.badastronomy.com
www.nasa.gov
www.isas.ac.jp
www.federalspace.ru
marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov
pluto.jhuapl.edu
messenger.jhuapl.edu
saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
www.esa.int
marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov
hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu
www.astro.cornell.edu
www.planetary.org

I've also added two "refinements" that allow for drilling in to unmannedspaceflight.com only (this is the same as a google search with site:unmannedspaceflight.com added but it might be useful to have a "UMSF and Related sites" option) and also an attempt to get an unmannedspaceflight.com images search that isn't working right.

Any suggestions on sites to add? remove?

It seems to work quite well for me but I wont really be able to tell until I'm actually going looking for something that I'm finding hard to locate.

[babakm]

Great Idea! Here are a couple more sites:

www.msss.com
*.jpl.nasa.gov
www.jaxa.jp

[helvick]

Thanks. For some reason Google have disabled the ability to add wildcards within domain names (so *.jpl.nasa.gov can't be added).

It is possible to add a long list of sites sites (up to 2000) as a single large xml file so if anyone knows an easy way to get a list of all of the useful nasa.gov sub-domain names then I can hack that together fairly quickly.

[Stephen]

For some reason Google have disabled the ability to add wildcards within domain names (so *.jpl.nasa.gov can't be added).

Doesn't Google's "site" command work?

I find (for ordinary Google searches):

site:jpl.nasa.nov == *.jpl.nasa.gov

That is, "site:jpl.nasa.nov" will confine a search to sites with hostnames which end in "jpl.nasa.gov", such as "http://www.jpl.nasa.gov', "http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov", "http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov", etc, etc.

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Stephen

[helvick]

The site: filter still works as it always did within the standard Google search box. It can be used as part of a refinement and it can also be added by the user to a custom search query if they choose. However, I was referring to the Customised Search interface which says that you have to be precise about domain names. The helpd file states that:

Entire sites: You can specify an entire site to be included or excluded. For example, specifying www.mysite.com/* will include or exclude all the pages on www.mysite.com. Note that mysite.com does NOT match subsite.mysite.com, so be specific.

You can use wildcards in the non domain portion of the url so www.y.com/*kites will match any page within a url that has a name that includes the word kites.