[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.

[jaredGalen]

Helvick, speaking of search engines, have you seen YubNub.org?

Can actually be very powerfully, defining custom searches and commands, the potential could be there to define custom search tags for directing searches through the coop search you have set up.

I use it to give me access to multiple search engines from a single search bar, e.g. y cassini uses yahoo to search, g cassini uses google etc.

Just said I'd mention it.

[helvick]

Jared,

That's damn interesting - thanks, I 'll have to dig into it to see how to make it do what I want but it really looks like a very clever approach to the web. I already use Firefox keyword shortcuts so that entering g search term in the address bar searches google for my search term or imdb search term does the same for imdb, u opens up umsf on the "View new posts" page which makes getting my fix really easy. This is a way to offload these shortcuts to the web so that they work on any browser anywhere not just on my instance of FF

Neat.

JoeM