I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I think exposing library records alone may not be the best path, though it may help in some ways. I’ve also mentioned that I like some of google’s services such as the music aggregation, calculator and the like. Apparently you can build your own services that google users can subscribe to. If their query matches some you have specified then your result shows up at the top like a service. I didn’t know this was available but it opens the door for a lot of experiments. Digital collections, reference services and holdings could be pushed to the top when the query of choice is chosen. One way to push presence. It’d be interesting to see if OpenWorldCat or similar add a subscribe service so that searching for an author or something close to the title brings up their find in a library at the top. Hopefully I’ll get some time to play with this.

I also came across a post describing google co-op a bit more. It mentioned things like clustered results, meta-vertical-search, etc. Some interesting changes.

Right now none of it appears to be working for me so maybe they are slowly rolling it out. I get a 500 server error on most subscriptions i try to do and none of the custom results.