Building your own search engine

Building your own search engine sounds like it would be a highly technical, and therefore difficult task. But it isn't! There are a number of tools available that allow you to customize a search engine with a few clicks of the mouse. Effectively, this means that you can select the web sites you feel are the most important for your work, and run searches just on those pages.

Here are two examples of custom-built search engines (both used Google's application):

Forced Migration Search Engine
The Humanitarian Drive

And this article describes a number of online tools that you can use to create your own engine: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/search-engines/