Pulling anything from other people websites is illegal.

First make sure you have the “Menu bar” in your “Internet Explorer” activated. If it is not active, right-click somewhere on the grey area on the “Internet Explorer” window and make sure the “Menu Bar” option is checked.

When the “Menu Bar” is visible, click on “Tools” at the far right, then click on “Manage Add-ons”. Click on ‘Enable or Disable Add-Ons’. In the list of “Add-ons” select “Softonic English Toolbar”. Look below and click on the ‘Disable’ button. You may need to restart your computer for it to take effect”.

You say that there are only 6 schools that offer the major you want, and one of them is Stanford, but as far as I can tell, Stanford doesn’t offer a major in English composition. On their website, they list English literature, English with a Creative Writing emphasis, English literature and Foreign Language literature, English with an Interdisciplinary Emphasis, and English Literature and Philosophy. No English composition.

The problem with Google, though, is that one can’t just type a phrase into its search box and expect to get tons of good and relevant results. It actually requires the judicious use of plus and minus symbols, and quotation marks, and capital “OR” and proper spacing and… well… suffice it to say that it can be tricky.

That said, it’s not rocket science, either. It’s just that if one expects to really get the biggest bang for his/her buck out of Google, then one needs to learn how to use some of its advanced operators:

+ – ” ” and OR

There are others, but if one learns how to use just those, one will be amazed how much better one’s search results will get.

To your question, though: Roll-your-own degree programs are rare. They’re not so rare that it’s almost impossible to find any, mind you… but there are darned few of them. That said, I’ll bet there are probably thirty times as many right now than there were only two years ago… in largest measure because with the economy the way it is, and things getting tight, schools are hurting, too. So the creative ones that understand marketing are now starting to do things like offer roll-your-own degree programs as a means of attracting more students.

UMass Amherst has one; and so does Antioch University Seattle. Those two come immediately to mind. There are at least three others, as I recall… one in Vermont or New Hampshire, I think… though I can no longer remember the name of it. Er… well… let’s stop guessing and start Googling.

Go to Google, and type the following EXACTLY AS IT APPEARS, below, into the Google search box:

+customized OR individualized OR “build your own” OR “roll your own” OR “create your own” +bachelors OR ba OR bs OR “b.a.” OR “b.s.” +degree OR major site:.edu

And by “EXACTLY,” I really mean it… include plus signs, capitalization, quotations… EXACTLY as you see it. In fact, better to copy and paste it so you won’t get a single part of it wrong.

Then click on the “Search” button.

Much, MUCH better results, eh?

Just be really careful, though. By specifying that the results can only be on web sites whose URLs end in “.edu” I helped to keep dipoloma mills out of the search results; but it’s a sad fact that some unaccredited schools with “.edu” domain names were “grandfathered in” after the US Department of Education (USDE) required that only fully accredited schools could use the “.edu” domain. So if you do find something that interests you, LOOK IT UP to make sure it’s accredited by an agency approved by USDE or the Council on Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) before you let yourself get too excited about it.

To determine if ANY school is properly accredited, look it up at:

http://www.chea.org/search

If it’s not in that database, then BE WARY. A school can’t even get into that database unless it’s accredited. If it’s not in that database, then the only other possibility is that it’s one of the handful of accredited schools that are listed in the USDE database, but not in the CHEA database (there are so few that you’re unlikely to ever encounter any), or the school is unaccredited. And if it’s not in the CHEA database, odds are that it’s unaccredited.

If you insist on an English Comp degree, and on staying in your home state, then perhaps you should consider a distance learning degree. Remember that “online” or “distance learning” or “distance education” degrees are not automatically diploma mills. Even Harvard offers distance learning degrees, now. All kinds of fully accredited institutions are now offering all kinds of fully accredited degrees completely either online, or via correspondence with CDs or DVDs, or a mixture of both. As long as the school is accredited, they’re every bit as legitimate as a degree earned by sitting in the classroom.

The only danger is that you really have to make sure the distance learning school and program you select really is accredited (by looking it up in the CHEA database) because nearly all of the nefarious diploma mills use, nearly exclusively, the “distance learning” paradigm. And some of their web sites look so good that it can be difficult to tell if it’s legitmate or not. So ALWAYS look-up every school in the CHEA database. Do NOT take the school’s web site’s word for it that it is accredited.

If you would be willing to get your bachelors in English Comp via distance learning, then the following Google search should help you:

+”english composition” OR “english comp” +bachelors OR ba OR bs OR “b.a.” OR “b.s.” +degree OR major +online OR “distance learning” OR “distance education” site:.edu

And, again, you must key-in the above EXACTLY as it appears (or,

If you just want to crawl the web searching for things (like a friend of mine wrote a spider that search the web for his name) then you can just write a bot or spider.

The spider program just makes consecutive HTTP request to every link on a page. So when it starts, it goes to the first page, finds every link on that page, pulls out al the addresses and then searches all those pages, repeating the process.

You’ll need to know how to write data structures and do searching and sorting as well as parsing HTML, regular expression, etc.

This can be done in any language, but what you need is already in .NET, Java and PERL.

The logic is pretty simple. Search Engine crawl the web like a robot and look for specific words and keep them in there local database with indexing. If the user searches a word it will retrieve all the closest matches and display in the screen. If the word is not present it will be added to crawl robot list.

Hope this answers your question.

You need to create a spider program that goes surfing the web, collecting links and downloading entire websites. You need the spider to be smart, so it respects the robots.txt guidelines and doesn’t clog up the sites it visits.

You need to create a program that gets the relevant keywords from a given webpage (*any* webpage) so you can search for them.

You need to design a database so you can optimize the way you store the addresses and relevant keywords, so the process of searching through them is not resource-expensive.

You need either a big, ungodly fast computer or tons of small computers so processing everyone’s queries doesn’t take a century or so.

You need lots of disk space just to store a list of all the webpages of the Internet. Multiply that by the number of keywords a webpage has.