Today I have been spending most of the morning searching for courses for my girlfriend Allison. She needs to find a sociology course in Belgium to complete her bachelor degree. This is a long and tedious process – first finding all the universities, then looking up the course directories and then finding the appropriate course.

So an idea struck me – why isn’t there a search engine that combines all these course catalogues into a single search engine? Most course catalogues are published online, they should be easily crawlable and eventually you might even get the universities to offer you access to their database (it is after all in their interest to promote their course offering).

This is of course an area where Google might move in and dominate eventually, but until then it would be an interesting experiment. Maybe this is what I should use my Google App Engine account for.

What do you think? Is there a similar product that I have not yet found? Give feedback!