Alternative Search Engines - Slideshare Presentation

Some goodies here! You'll definitely want to book mark some of these. Watch it full screen on Slideshare.

Information update May 2010 Alternative Search engine

View more presentations from inbarya.

Remember when I posted the other day and said: "This was shared on Bright Ideas , a blog by the School Library Association of Victoria(SLAV)"? So much good stuff on this blog. I am recommending again that you subscribe.

Do "student-friendly" search engines make a librarian's job easier?

Sweet Search - A Search Engine for Students

From Sweet Search : This "is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. "
Sweet Search can be used by visiting the site directly or you can embed Sweet Search widgets into your blog or website. I took a look at the librarian selected sites which were excellent. I like the idea of embedding their widgets easily into our Libguides. This sounds great!

But wait a minute,I can't help but feel that there is essentially a big "shortcut" here that could leave long negative long-terms consequences for teaching search strategies.  If we exclusively use these type of tools when are we able to introduce concepts of critical thinking and web site evaluation?

Professor Howard Rheingold has developed a wiki called  Critical Thinking Compendium where there are already dozens of resources linked.


Join this wiki to browse resources and contribute some of your own.  Here's a sampling:


Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "critical thinking"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on critical_thinking from Diigo

• Critical Thinking
• EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
• Critical thinking In the classroom
• YouTube - Critical Thinking: A Reasoning Experience
• YouTube - Critical Thinking and the Basic Elements of Thought
• This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
• Critical Thinking On The Web
• Argument Mapping
• Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind
• Intute - Training - Encouraging Critical Thinking Online

---

Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "crap detection"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on crap_detection from Diigo

• Website Credibility Determined by the Search Route » Spotlight
• Open Thinking Wiki
• EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
• US record labels starts fake "citizen's group" to support Canada's DMCA - Boing Boing
• This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
• Gulf oil spill: To control message, BP buys search terms from Google - CSMonitor.com
• Twitter Journalism » Vetting Twitter Sources
• When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent
• On Wikipedia: Dr. Handel or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia
• Ideas Project

Don't get me wrong, I think I will definitely be using some Sweet Search widgets in the future.  But we cannot afford to outsource our role as teachers of digital literacy.

UK Librarian Phil Bradley Shares a Cool Customizable Multi-Search Engine

Favitt is a multi search engine in that it provides links to different engines via tabs (Google for websearch, Images are pulled from Bing, YouTube is available, there's Amazon, Wikipedia, etc. You can have up to 6 immediately tabbed and available with more available in a drop down menu.

The new functionality also allows you to  add your own tabs for your own choice of sites - such as getting Favitt to search *your* site (via Google's index, which is the only drawback). Click here to view the New Trier page I made.

I agree with Phil that it's a "really neat idea, and well executed". 

Bing is Live

Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft, went live this morning.

Here is the link.

It has a number of nice features (search history, a "roll-over" explanation of the page, suggestions for similar searches, advanced search, etc).
Here is a short video:

Wolfram|Alpha Launch Webcast Beginning this Friday @ 7pm CDT

Google Search Options

Check out Searchology and some new options unveiled by Google:

More information on the official Google blog.

Chrome - the new web browser from Google

Chrome is an open-source minimalist browser with no status bar, no menu bar and only a single tool bar. David Pogue reviews it in today's New York Times: "Minimalist Chrome Is Built for a Future That Blurs the Lines of Web and Desktop".

Linda Straube found the YouTube video: "10 Features of Google's Chrome"

Listen and learn about all the smart features. It is available for download at google.com/chrome

New Search Engine Unveiled Today

You may want to give the new search engine a whirl. It's called Cuil, pronounced "cool" which is trying to compete head to head with Google. Danny Sullivan, the search engine guru says that it's got promise. Cuil indexes 120 billion web pages. Instead of showing results with snippets of description, it displays more text and pictures and provides for refining your search for more relevant results. I will, of course, start playing with it immediately to determine how useful it will be for my students. Read a review of Cuil or go try it yourself by doing a Google search :) or go to http://www.cuil.com/.

FactBites - Where results make sense

FactBites - Where results make sense
http://www.factbites.com/
This new tool is a cross between a search engine with an encyclopedia. The search results page itself includes key sentences from each of the sources retrieved. Uber-researcher Mary Ellen Bates, in her BatesInfoTip Newsletter recommends this as a "useful filter on search results that may help you find in-depth answers quickly." Although it will never replace Google, its advocates say that "We think Factbites is better than other search engines when it comes to presenting you with clearly summarized factual information."

New Test Finds Student's Cyber Aptitude Wanting

I found this in the Sunday Tribune.

Just 52 percent of test takers could correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site and only 65 percent assessed the site's authoritativeness.
When asked to use a search engine to look for information on the Internet, only 40 percent entered multiple search terms to narrow the results.

Heyboer, Kelly. "New Test Finds Students' Cyber Aptitude Wanting." Chicago Tribune 18 Feb. 2007, sec. 1: 6.

I want to take this test and find out what my digital (The word cyber is so 90's.) aptitude is. I'd like to think I've got a step up on most people when it comes to digital literacy but the sad truth is that I find myself all too often turning to Wikipedia and Google (only) for a quick informational fix. I've asked several kids about what they would do if they had to look up Teddy Roosevelt and didn't know anything about him. They all said Wikipedia. Are some kids digitally illiterate or is it more about laziness? It's a lot easier to just jump to Google or Wikipedia than to query several different search engines or to browse several different websites.

We definitely need to educate our students on how to find valid information, but how will we fight digital laziness?

From Marylaine Block's Newsletter

Good link suggested from Marylaine Block's Newsletter on alternatives to Google. Speciality search engines work well when your purpose
might be a clustering engine that maps results, a recommendation search
tool, a spoken word engine, a social bookmark tool, or a podcast search
engine. See "Neat New Stuff I Found This Week"
http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html Try subscribing to Marylaine Block's weekly posts. She is one of the best "Internet Librarians" and finds incredibly great stuff to share with teachers.

Adding Google Scholar Search

You can now add Google Scholar to your website/blog by following some simple steps in this months Google Newsletter. Very simple to do. Try it!