I can't believe it's been so long since I posted. But I've been really busy with work and personal life. Going to the ALA conference in Washington, D.C. didn't help. I'm still determined to finish this before the end of July, even if I've gotten a little behind.
I can definitely see these kinds of search boxes being a time saver in the fact that you can search more than one place at a time, but at the same time you are only searching relevant sources instead of using something like Google, which searches everything.
It reminds me of some of how some libraries are starting to use metasearching programs for their databases. For instance when I was in library school at Indiana University, they had just started to roll out something called "One Search @ IU". It had a lot of problems though. For one thing the searches took a long time. Another problem was that different databases used different kinds of subject headings and had different kinds of search methods. As a result your results didn't always reflect everything that was in all the databases. I imagine programs like this have similar problems. If different websites use different kinds of tags and use different terms for the same thing, you won't always get all the results you could have gotten searching each website separately.
This would be a helpful addition though for library subject pages and research guides. I made a searchroll for websites that deal with Economics because that's one of my liaison areas. Though I was a little concerned about all the advertisements, I wanted to post it to my library wiki page for Economics. Only I couldn't get the code to work. In fact the first time I tried to add it to this post, I got an error message. But the code was so messy I couldn't see where the problem was. I finally figured out I was having trouble with the "style" part of it. I redid it and then it worked. I'm frustrated that I can't seem to add it to my wiki page though. I think something about the links in the code is messing it up when I try to paste it into my wiki page.
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