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.

I’m back on to acquainting myself with the many search engines available. Funny that once you start looking there are so many more than you’d imagine.

Ask Jeeves was an old favourite of mine. I used to recommend it to the kids in primary school because it coped with them typing  in a whole question. It picks out the keywords and searches for them. But it used to be pretty limited in its relevant results and very American-oriented so we dropped off using it.

It’s now called Ask Kids and has ‘grown up’ some since I used it last.

The home page is really kid friendly and clean (no advertising at all). Once in a search there are sponsored websites but no advertising. I tested both natural language (What endangered animals are there in Australia?) and keyword (volcano causes) searches.

Once you’ve hit the search button, the next screen offers you some broader and narrower search term options in a side bar(the Australian animals search options were not Australian however) and then the search results in the main body of the page.  There was much more success with the volcano search than the Australian animal question – it still appears to be heavily slanted to American audiences. The first 5 hits I did get for Australian endangered species were:

• kidcyber.com.au
• Kids’ Planet – to be searched by continent – ‘grey wolves’ were incorrectly listed under the Australian continent! and the fact sheets for most of the animals were general not Australian specific. (Info quality – poor).
• a dead link to a public library homework page
• Perth Zoo with some species listed in their conservation program

So overall a disappointing result. But Boolean searching using keywords ‘endangered animals OR species’  brought up different and better results.

I had much better luck with volcanoes. First 5 hits included:

• learner.org
• ThinkQuest
• Cascades Volcano Observatory
• Volcano Live (website of John Search scientist and volcano adventurer)
• Staffordshire Learning Net Web Enquiry (webquest)

Ask Kids also offers options to search ‘images’ and ‘video’. Again the first question had poor results, the volcano search results were much better.

One feature I really missed on this site was knowing the total number of hits for a search. It always helps me to gauge if the student is searching too broadly or narrowly.

Ask Kids has other areas including one called ‘The Schoolhouse” which features databases by subject area. I searched here too and found useful information for both topics.

Overall, this search engine performs best  if keyword searching and Boolean search strategies are used. It seems to be well pitched for middle primary to lower secondary or for ESL students. Subjects still need to be fairly general in order to get decent search results.

Continuing with my exploration of and education in search engines.

Bing is Microsoft’s replacement for LiveSearch. It was launched in June 2009 and is still in Beta (which means they’ve released it to the public but are still testing it).

The homepage is nice and clean (no advertising or boxes full of sponsored links). There is a background feature photo (today of rice fields in Bali) containing relevant hot links to video and promotional information. (You can see in the photo above a box that appeared when I scrolled over one of the links).

As I started a  search with my keywords (global warming) their ’search suggestions’ feature fired up and offered me:

• global warming
• global dimming
• globalization
• global tv

and many more. This feature can be turned off by clicking a link at the bottom of the box. I find this feature very useful for students who are not good at spelling. They can concentrate on the search and not be embarrassed or sidetracked.

Once I hit enter,  the search offered me 13,900,000 results with sponsored sites (clearly marked) at the top. I know more hits is not better so I was more interested to see that the most relevant sites pulled up did not differ at all from the ones pulled up by Yahoo!7 except in order (but not by much).

One of its best features you won’t see until you scroll you mouse over the text for a result. It’s then that a little orange dot appears on the right-hand side, scroll your mouse to it and a preview of the page pops up. You’ll get the first few sentences on the web page and perhaps some details of what else is on the opening page (if there are portals or links) — you can see the little box below on the right.

Related search terms are listed in the left sidebar and are helpful for students not quite sure of the best search terms.  Like Google, if you click on the little hyperlink “cached page” the page will come up with your search keywords color-coded and highlighted throughout the text – useful for very long documents.

One feature on this search engine that could turn out to be a real time-waster for students is a search option called “xRank” trademarked by Bing.  Here’s Bing’s blurb on what it is:

xRank keeps track of notable people and puts them in order for you. We count Bing web searches for movie stars, musicians, and other famous people. Then, we compile our findings into an insightful ranking formula that tells you who the world is searching for most. The result is a cultural snapshot of who’s hot and who’s not!

This search option will also allow you to create graphs that compare the popularity of two celebrities over the last six months. Hmm, useful? I guess if you were involved in the paparazzi this could help.

Our ETL501 subject guide suggests:

As the school’s information professional, the TL is often seen as the school’s ‘Internet expert’. (Herring, 2008, p. 14)

and asks us to increase our knowledge of search engines so I thought I’d blog my way through some of them to get to know them better. I am probably as guilty as the next person of being highly dependent on Google to conduct searches because it is familiar and ‘comfortable’.

Our course wants us to evaluate the effectiveness of the search engines and recommends:

An effective search strategy is one that is based on the purpose and the need of the searcher. (Herring, 2004, p.31) (italics are mine)

but I’ll get to serious evaluation later. First I think I need to get to know the features of each search engine and the ‘feel’ of them before I can make judgements.

I’m starting with the single search engines then I’ll move to the meta search engines. First off the mark is Yahoo!7 – the Australian version of Yahoo!

When I first opened it, I felt like I was looking at a cross between a shopping centre and a celeb gossip magazine. That’s why I’d always avoided it in the past and never recommended it to students. But I entered my trial keywords (global warming) and hit enter.

At the top of the results page I’m offered the option of searching: 1/ the Web; 2/Australia; 3/ New Zealand so that’s a plus – students can narrow down the results to obtain relevant information for our area. The result page also offered lots of search suggestions under:

Also try:

• global warming australia
• causes of global warming
• effects of global warming
• global warming articles
• al gore global warming

When I hit ‘more’ it also offered concept categories to explore, all relevant to global warming. Eg.

• Climate Change
• greenhouse gases
• the greenhouse effect
• carbon dioxide

• fossil fuels
• emissions
• atmosphere
• Methane

Very handy for students as well.

The original search brought up 229,000,000 hits and after this figure at the top of the page I noticed their ‘about this page’ hyperlink so I clicked it. More useful info!

On the ‘About” page I found out there is an ad-free, dedicated Yahoo! search start page. Nothing on it but the search box and logo. I also learned that Yahoo! has lots more web search options than I’d realised (click on “More>>” just above the search box). Many are the same as Google (news, images, maps), others of interest were:

• directory – which is a subject-based and human-edited website guide (Google also has this feature, you just never hear of it). Using this feature and my keywords, my search resulted in 2,178 sites, all of much higher quality (authority-wise). The results also indicate categories (eg. Category: Global Warming > Opposing Views, Category: Columns and Columnists)
• local – a guide to local businesses (didn’t bring up any results for ‘global warming’ but could be of use for other searches)
• Answers – where you can ask real people, real questions (who these people are who answer, of course, is an issue but they may offer new directions for a student). Answers submitted can be rated according to usefulness by users.

Lastly, I discovered Yahoo! has a service they call ShortCuts (both Service Shortcuts and Open Shortcuts). If there is a relevant Service shortcut to your search, a small note will appear up at the top of your results page (eg. calculator, time zone, weather, etc). Open shortcuts will search favourite sites or start an Internet application. There are already many default shortcuts (eg. !movies, !mysp = myspace.com, !wiki = wikipedia) or you can create and set your own by following the instructions at the hyperlink involved.

I’m really glad I took the time to explore this search engine. I’m now going to include the Yahoo! directory search into my repertoire of assistance and onto the school’s Project Hotspots page.

I ran across this excellent UK-based site this morning in my ‘web wandering’ and thought I’d post it as others may also find it of use especially teachers working in the areas of debate and issues.

TrueTube

TrueTube explains itself as:

a free website which uses real-life stories and issues to encourage teenagers to explore and debate the world of morality, ethics, politics and religion. TrueTube brings to life the subjects at the heart of Secondary Education using short-form web-based video and multimedia technology. The site encourages teenagers to find their voice as they explore their own value systems and those of their peers around the corner and across the world.

I’ve had a little look around on the site and am very impressed. The contributions are monitored so the quality is good. Videos are down-loadable in case this site is blocked so teachers can still use them. There’s a tab at the top of the homepage on how to use the site – comments, videos can be uploaded as well as downloaded. The link below is to an article about the site.

http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/web-articles/Web-Article1205