I’ve been playing around a little more with Google Coop, and discovered that you can use wildcards when defining the sites you want to search.
The way the standard LGSearch works is that I provide Google with a list of the sites I want it to search. Every single one of them. It’s not fun. But it does mean I can tag them with the category of site it falls into, making the filtering possible.
But with LGSearch.Gov.uk I just submitted one ‘site’ – *.gov.uk. In other words, every site that ends with .gov.uk! This means that as new sites are added, or taken away, the search engine will update automatically.
I don’t think this will be as useful as the standard LGSearch, but it might be a useful second option if you can’t find what you want first time round.