Jim at Ideum encouraged me to have a play with Google’s Co-op Search.
In about 5 minutes I set up the start of a global museum collection search.
Give it a go – either by using the box below or visiting its own page museum collection search.
Then contribute your own museum collection URLs to it by following the instructions on the search page.
Obviously this only works for collections that have been well spidered by Google already. It won’t pick up those that aren’t – I tried adding the Victoria & Albert Museum’s image search without much success, for example. Others that are well spidered like ours and the Met Museum work very well.
Google Co-op is really a way of refining the results of standard Google by focussing its results on an aggregated selection of URLs – think of it as a way of performing multiple advanced searches at the same time.