Always wanted to build your own search engine?

The great news is that some really top-notch universities are beginning to offer free classes to anyone with an internet connection; if you love learning, this is for you. It's also a great way to brush up on your skills. Harvard and MIT are teaming up to offer classes, as are University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan through their commercial joint venture, Coursera, which features classes from those two schools plus Princeton, Stanford, and others.

In addition, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who last year ran an Artificial Intelligence class online that drew over 150,000 students worldwide, has started a new company, Udacity, with six classes - one of which is CS101: Building a Search Engine.

So if you're frustrated with your existing commercial platform, and you just don't get into open source for some reason, you can finally have it all! Write your own search engine. My guess is this will help you appreciate what your current platform does for you; but you never know.

Let me know how you like the class - I just signed up myself!