TL Under Construction

Probably one of my favourite search engines for students right now is Study Search.

Study Search explains itself as:

[using] the power of Google’s search engine combined with a growing database of educational websites. When a search is done, Google checks our database and gives those sites priority in the search results. The student is still doing a full Google search but the results are tuned to display sites that are more relevant.

The ‘About ‘ page goes on to explain that sites within their database are compiled from suggestions by teachers, Teacher-Librarians and site volunteers. As a student of ETL 501 currently studying educational website criteria and evaluation of websites, I was interested to know if the suggestions sent in were evaluated in any way. The FAQs mention only that –  “sites are selected on their content and ease of navigation”. I clicked on the website suggestion form link to see if there was anything that might enlighten me further — there was not.

Other features include  a choice between primary and secondary school searches and the site defaults to Google’s Safesearch mode of searching (although this may make little difference to many schools with their own filters).

In all the searches I perform/supervise with students at school, this search engine returns the highest number of relevant, readable sites and is in the familiar Google format.  Yes, yes they should get to know the many advantages of the others and I encourage them to experiment but as far as reducing the frustration factor goes, this one wins hands down so far.