Eclectic Technology

Thanks to Richard Byrne for sharing a post on a new search engine, Athenir. This visual search engine provides a view that may help learners discover additional search terms, allowing them to more easily find the information they are looking for. His post (linked to by clicking his name above) explains that this is just the beginning with additional items being added over the summer. 

If you have used Carrot2 the visual seen above may be familiar to you. Athenir is using Yahoo as the base for its' searches.

Providing learners access to search engines beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo is important. There are many search engines that are geared to younger students, that are more visual in nature...this list could go on. The visual component of this is colorful and allows learners to view their search in a format that many find helpful.

Finding great tools for students to use is often overwhelming. This post shares six specific tools as well as two lists from EdShelf. The six tools shown also include a video overview. They are:

* InstaGrok

* Colwiz

* SweetSearch

* DocsTeach

* Boolify

* Scrible

One list from EdShelf includes 18 tools and the other includes 12 tools. The range of tools is applicable for students from elementary school though high school and college.

Today many students when asked a question choose to Google the answer. A generation is turning to one (or perhaps two or three) search engines and reading the top two or three results. As educators we should think about how this type of search is impacting how our students think. This post explores this, looking at three areas:

1. Google creates the illusion of accessibility

2. Google naturally suggests “answers” as stopping points

3. Being linear, Google obscures the interdependence of information

What do you think? Do you think Google is impacting student learning? Do you think that project based learning, inquiry learning, authentic learning projects would provide opportunities for students to not only search, but to use their critical thinking skills? This post may make you look at search engines in a different way. 

Many students are not aware that there is an "invisible web" that may be searched, one that is not quite so easy to find but has more information than Google provides (which tends to look at the "Surface Web"). According to this post Google has indexed "roughly 200 terabytes" while the size of the Internet is estimated at "5 million terabytes" of information.

The post provides a look at what is not found through Google (or other common search engines) and then shares:
* A list of Open Access Journal Databases (with over 10 databases with descriptions)

* A list of Invisible Search Engines. Quoting from the post "The search engines that deliver results from the invisible web are distinctly different. Narrower in scope, these deep web engines tend to access only a single type of data…deep web searches tend to be more thoughtful in their initial query requirements." Ten search engines are listed and there is a short description for each.

* A list of subject-specific databases in the following areas

     - Art & Design

     - Business

     - Legal & Social Services

     - Science & Technology

     - Healthcare

Although this post is geared to students in college there are resources that may be used by students in middle or high school provided, and as teachers it is important for us to learn more about this "invisible web" and to share it with our students.