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Course search

Submitted by: siliconglen
Created: Aug 31, 2006, 10:32 am

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Not freeish. Not freesque. It's free!

The Idea

Create a website where people can search for courses. Want to know where to get Microsof/Java/Cisco certification? Wondering where you can do an MBA or Project Management qualification? Wondering if where you find is really the cheapest? Looking for distance learning or open learning, correspondence courses to tie in with your work, sorted by price? Certainly from the point of view of someone in the UK who has been looking for MBA and Project Management qualifications in the last 6 months there is nowhere offering anything like a decent search for courses and classes Site initially gets data by having RSSScraper or similar parse content from relevant sites. Later, sites could either: 1. Pay for an enhanced listing (basic listing free) 2. Pay the search engine for referrals 3. Pay for reports on what people are searching for. 4. Search engine could also take adverts, adsense, and build up value as a busy community site, discussing courses and options etc.

I thought of this idea when I was...

Getting very frustrated looking for courses and having to go onto dozens of poorly written sites to only find a narrow subset.

Comments Posted

kleine2 Posted: September 2, 2006, 11:44 pm

Great idea.
You should have reviews too so people who took the course can say how good it was and if it was worth the money and so on. I think it would be easier to get in touch with the places running courses and get the information from them directly than to parse and to use scrapping.

Imhotep Posted: September 3, 2006, 10:47 am

Great idea & also like Kleine2's remark : reviews will enhance the value + allow companies that organize these courses to steer these courses in the right direction ( Most courses I attend always ask for feedback from the audience already).

Some additional money generators :

1. Based on demand, the business itself could pro-actively create & offer new courses ( besides offering reports on search results).
2. Offer customized online courses ( price depends highlyon "how" different from standard courses + minimum demand )

firefox Posted: August 2, 2007, 9:48 pm

I think this has already been done for a few segments of education. Do check out and update us.

Neelesh Posted: August 3, 2007, 12:23 am

i guess that u would get enough info through google ...

PhilipH Posted: August 3, 2007, 11:39 am

I love the way these last comments ignore the bit of the proposal that says he's spent the last six months looking for these sites that are presumed to exist already...

It seems like a simple enough idea and shouldn't be too difficult if you can manage to generate enough revenue from ads (or the suggestions above) so if you perceive there's a niche, fill it!

saigon Posted: August 6, 2007, 4:36 am

would this IDEA be answered by your other idea re "inteliigent search spider" engine" ?

Hello!

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