This assignment helped me realize that being a creature of habit has limited what I find out on the web. I always search Yahoo! or Google. I did not realize that they could be much more efficient tools than I had previously seen. I also did not realize that for some situations other search engines might be more appropriate.
The 3 search engines I chose to try out this week are:
www.lycos.com
www.marcopolosearch.org
www.altavista.com
Lycos is powered by Ask.com. The neatest feature of Lycos that I noticed was that after clicking on a link, it opened up a frame on the left side of the screen that kept your search results open. This way after viewing a link, you do not have to go to your Back button to find your results again.
Alta Vista seemed to come up with the most interesting links. Many of them were actual wikis people had created to talk about the uses of wikis in education.
Although it returned only one hit, I was most interested in Marco Polo Search. Despite the URL, the search engine seems to actually be called Thinkfinity, and it is somehow associated with Verizon wireless. Thinkfinity is a search engine designed specifically for k-12 educators. It searches about 7 different sites that carry educational resources from articles to lesson plans. Some of the materials it returns are “partner reviewed”. The search is much more limited than Google, but it would a good place to go if you are looking specifically for online content for your classroom. For more specific searches I ran it gave me just a few hits. I decided to try a more general search and searched the word Spain. It returned 234 hits. They were not organized in any useful way from what I could see. The results I got from doing a narrower search were much more useful.
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4 comments:
Hi Eric, so the next time you are looking for class materials, do you think you will fall back on your old habits and go straight to Google? Or, did Marco Polo impress you enough to give them another shot. I really liked one of the engines I found, but still don't think I will use it in the future.
John, I do think I'll try Marco Polo out a few times. I do want to research a little more the different sites that it searches. I want to see how one goes about adding content to those resources.
The Marcopolosearch is pretty good. Interesting resource for teachers certainly--which seems to be the point. Thanks.
What kind of results were returned with the first two search engines? Were there any differences in the results? Did one have more blogs/wikis than others? Did one have more commercial sites than the other?
Dan
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