November 17, 2003
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3 LO Searches for 1 Query: Merlot's Federated Search
Zoom-zoom. More power for those looking for learning objects or instructional resources. MERLOT's Federated Search allows you to enter keywords (say "cell mitosis") and with one click conduct a search of MERLOT, Australia's )EdNA Online, and the Science Math resources of SMETE. Actually the EdNA folks had demo-ed this first at the MERLOT 2003 conference last August.
That is a lot of search power for you. Now if only the search results were savable as a URL... or federated RSS... or free wine...
<tiphat>tip of the blog hat to Brian Lamb for mentioning this recently</tiphat>
blogged November 17, 2003 02:15 PM :: category [ objects ]
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It would be interesting (to me at least) to find out how they decide on the comparative relevancies of results from different catalogs. I liked the fact that the default result seemed to be by relevance across catalogs, but couldn't puzzle out (nor did there seem to be any material supporting) why any result was higher than the other.
I cannot recall what they said during the MERLOT presentation, but would guess the ranking is pretty simple such as occurrence count of keywords...
Commented by: Alan Levine on November 17, 2003 04:50 PMGee, and Google only gives you one search for a query....
Commented by: Stephen Downes on November 17, 2003 06:28 PMand Google gives you all those thousands of other matches that are not learning objects (porn too!)
Commented by: Alan Levine on November 18, 2003 06:59 PM
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