Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#1

Post by pierrefar » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 5:30 PM UTC

Hell all,

I've been hacking at this for many weeks and I'd love your feedback and guidance on how to improve it.

URL: http://www.ocwsearch.com/

What is it: A search engine for OpenCourseWare. Right now only MIT courses are indexed, but more universities and textbooks are planned.

Edit: It indexes all the lecture notes, the PDF files in the zip files, not just the course descriptions.

The blog has a poll for you to vote for what should come next.

What I'd like feedback on: Anything you see broken/improvable/missing. HN readers are the perfect target market so your feedback is going to carry a lot of weight.

Please get in touch: I've seen a few HN posts about OCW projects, and I'm very happy to connect with like-minded people. The email is pierre@(the domain name).

For the curious: The technology stack warrants its own blog post, so briefly: PHP, MongoDB, Redis, and Sphinx.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#2

Post by bwelford » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 5:37 PM UTC

Even though it only has the MIT OCW data so far this is a most impressive and user-friendly interface. Congratulations, I'm sure it will appeal to a wide audience. Sorry but I'm not in your market niche so I do not know what's available from other institutions.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#3

Post by Cinnamon » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 6:52 PM UTC

Cool project! How did you get Sphinx to index MongoDB?

Link: http://www.ocwsearch.com/

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#4

Post by Serene » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 6:55 PM UTC

Indexing lectures instead of courses is more useful.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#5

Post by pierrefar » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 6:59 PM UTC

Serene wrote: post #4

Indexing lectures instead of courses is more useful.

It indexes the PDFs in the zip files. It's not just the courses, but the full text of all the lectures in each course.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#6

Post by pierrefar » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 7:02 PM UTC

Cinnamon wrote: post #3

Cool project! How did you get Sphinx to index MongoDB? Link: http://www.ocwsearch.com/

Thanks!

I used the xmlpipe2 data source for Sphinx. A PHP script reads MongoDB and prints out the XML. Works a treat.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#7

Post by justliving » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 7:11 PM UTC

nice! looks like a useful service! The search was pretty snappy! Was impressed.

regarding the overall design, I think that a new make-up might not hurt ;)

What's your business model (if there is one), or are u doing it just for the fun of it?

Either way, keep up the good work! cheers

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#8

Post by pierrefar » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 7:27 PM UTC

justliving wrote: post #7

nice! looks like a useful service! The search was pretty snappy! Was impressed. regarding the overall design, I think that a new make-up might not hurt ;) What's your business model (if there is one), or are u doing it just for the fun of it? Either way, keep up the good work! cheers

Thanks!

Yes new make-up is needed. Clearly I am not a designer and I know that. If you have ideas, I'm keen to hear them. Also, if you have favorite search engines in terms of design and/or functionality, I'd like to see them for inspiration.

Business model: there are different directions this could go. Of course the Creative Commons license is the main constraint, and I have what I think are compatible ideas. For now, it's just for fun because I actually really wished I had an OCW search engine recently, so I built one.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#9

Post by kees » Tue, Apr 20, 2010, 10:44 PM UTC

Very useful product. This is a service I'm actually going to use. By the way, If you change your name to something more generic, add a couple of other educational sources to you engine as well, you will be google as academic earth is youtube.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my OpenCourseWare Search Engine

#10

Post by Serene » Wed, Apr 21, 2010, 12:53 AM UTC

pierrefar wrote: post #5

Serene wrote: post #4

Indexing lectures instead of courses is more useful.

It indexes the PDFs in the zip files. It's not just the courses, but the full text of all the lectures in each course.

What I meant is that I would prefer to see where exactly my keyword surfaced in the course - in what lecture or assignment vs lists of all courses mentioning the keywords.