I wrote about this last year before changing web hosting companies and just now got around to bringing this post over to my new blog. For sometime now I’ve been using Google’s co-op tool to create customized searches. When I was tasked with creating a repository of tutorials for our e-learning software I needed a way to make it quickly search-able of both the website and our expanding wiki site. So I turned to Google, like I do for so many things, to see what they had to offer. What I found was a wonderful way to make customized searches. Google coop lets you specify exactly which items are safe for the search engine to use. I control which sites it crawls and in what format it gives the results to the students. So far I couldn’t have been more pleased. As I began to play with this more I realized what a great tool this could be for educators of all content areas. Now instructors can choose to create customized searches that are appropriate for the students to use. So if you’re a history teacher looking to create a portal for students to search the web with this is your answer. If you’re a Literature teacher that’s asking the students to write about poetry here’s your chance to create a custom Poetry search. This search can be integrated into wikis, blogs, or any old web page you might want to create.