I had a quick look around for other Google Custom Search Engines, via a simple search for:

keyword site:www.google.com/coop/

Living-dead CSEs from circa-2006 litter the results, of course. Probably made in 30 minutes during the first flush of public interest in Google’s new toy, usually indexing less than 30 items, and then seemingly forgotten about within 30 days.

I guess that’s one of the main reasons why people don’t seem to hold specialist Google CSEs in high regard. Which probably helps to explain why a search for 2009 site:www.google.com/coop/ seems to show that only a mere 39 public CSE have either been built or updated in the last six months. It seems a shame that the academic community is fiddling with often-unlovable and quickly-stale niche wikis, while such a powerful tool is all-but unused except for an occasional private one-site index. It’s not as if CSEs don’t have tools for collaborative index-building and weeding.

With a few months of careful work by a professional or subject-specialist, there’s no reason why a CSE can’t hold its head up alongside funded/commercial services — as I hope I’ve shown with JURN. And if a developer plans ahead and uses some common tools, basic maintainance of a large curated engine — once complete — shouldn’t take more than a couple of days of work per year.

I did find a few CSEs in the humanities still showing some stamina…

Theological journal search (340+ titles inc. findarticles.com, last updated Jan 2009).

Online Biblical Studies journals (123 titles, the titles freely listed, last updated 2008).

Judaic Studies in English (278 sites, last updated Sept 2007).

Alcuin Society (139 sites on bibliophilia and book arts, last updated Oct 2008).

AuseSearch (All open access academic repositories in Australia that are listed in Kennan & Kingsley at Feb 2009).

Film Blogs (139 titles, the titles freely listed, last updated June 2009. Looks like a strong tool for quickly finding genuine reviews from film-buffs, as opposed to marketing psuedo-reviews).

Busador Cultural (a large academic-cultural-arts search-engine for Spanish-language material).

So where might there be scope for a strong new curated CSE, with a nice balance of focus and scope? It might be useful to have an engine for “books still of scholarly worth, and other useful non-fiction” which selects from the ebooks that are flooding out from the out-of-copyright book digitisation projects, indexing the full-text. Books such as Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer and Kitecraft and Kite Tournaments. There has to be a more enticing way to access this stuff than getting your keywords tangled in creaky Victorian potboilers and agricultural pamphlets from 1932, or ploughing through a daily list seemingly endlessly populated by thousands of 1920s pulp novels and Victorian romances. But I’m willing to bet that there’s no flag in the metadata which says “non-fiction / just the cool stuff”, so it might take a lot of work.