About
Hi, I am Damon Gudaitis, the chief librarian for Ask Olli.
How It All Began
Originally I was looking in to adding to the body of English language learning resources that you can find online. I was already familiar with a few of the biggest sites but before investing a lot of time in to the project I decided to do some more thorough research. After discovering many obscure, smaller sites with fabulous resources I started asking myself how I would make sure that my smaller site didn`t languish in obscurity. Before long, I concluded that the Internet needed a better way of organising the resources that were already online more than another site offering more resources. Ask Olli is designed to fill that need.
About Ask Olli Search
The technical name for the Ask Olli Search is vertical parametric search. Vertical search specialises in one area, with Ask Olli that is language learning. Vertical search is becoming common in business and industry because it is difficult to find specialised information with the big search engines. It is similarly difficult to find specialised language learning content online.
Parametric search allows you to limit your results to only those matching specific attributes (or parameters). It is a very useful feature when searching for language learning content because searchers want very different things depending on their motive. So, for example, someone who needs help with their homework probably isn`t interested in a quiz while someone who wants to listen to podcast lessons while commuting to work probably isn`t interested in anything other than podcasts. Ask Olli`s parametric search features make it easy to fulfill the need.
How the Index is Created
The various profiles on Ask Olli are all written by either the owner of the profile, or myself. We considered allowing any member to edit profiles or vote for different tags, similar to how Technorati and many other web 2.0 sites work, but decided against it because the most relevant tags for quizzes and puzzles also happen to be the answers which would ruin the quiz.
Ask Olli and askolli.com are tradenames for Vancouver, Canada based Olli Online Education.
Feel free to contact us online or at the address below.
Damon Gudaitis,
chief librarian, askolli.comOlli Online Education
3840 Eton St
Burnaby, BC
V5C 1J4, Canada