Thread:Guidelines / policy relating to ancillary web services (e.g. Google Custom Search) (1)

Due diligence could include (with search as an example):

0. Understand all the associated issues (e.g. privacy issues, lack of transparency in search prioritisation, dependence on one company for special features, risk of monopolies suppressing innovation, ...)

1. Do a thorough assessment of existing libre software options.

Start with Lucene and its sub-projects:

Find others - e.g. mentioned on WikiEducator, Wikipedia, etc. (via your favourite search engine :-).

2. Consider more creative options which might lend themselves well to education such as the Semantic MediaWiki extension.

3. Compromises may be possible. For example, allow users to set a preferred search service in their preferences. The default should be a libre option such as MWSearch. It may be possible to develop browser extensions (e.g. for Firefox) which search specific repositories.

4. Decouple the best educational search services from WikiEducator (not a new idea - e.g. http://www.oercommons.org). Establish an OERF project to establish or enhance best of breed federated education-oriented search across multiple OER repositories. Encourage third parties to develop educational search engines which also cover multiple sites. User may specify the search to include (e.g.) only WikiEducator [and/or some other group of repositories such as Wikiversity, Connexions, ...]. License should be something like: GNU Affero General Public License.