http://rollyo.com/sleslie/course_management_systems/
I knew I had to read Bryan Alexander’s Educause article on Web 2.0 not so much because the ideas would be new but because I knew that inevitably Bryan would point to some little gem in the ever growing Web 2.0 landscape that I hadn’t seen before.
One that was new to me that he pointed to was Rollyo – a site that lets you roll your own search index by providing up to 25 URLs you want indexed. I wanted to check it out, because ever since Atomz was bought out a year ago, I had been looking for a replacement free web-based service that would let me do this.
To try out Rollyo, I built the above index that searches the top 20 (IMO) Course Management System sites. So say for instance, you wanted to find out which of these systems supported the “eXe editor,” or was working on a blog project, you could try searching across just those sites for those terms. It is definitely not infallible, but I have been intrigued by the use of constrained search engines as a way to either augment or replace certain types of directories, where what is being catalogued is well known and fixed (for instance, all of the post-secondary course catalogues in a certain jurisdiction). – SWL