Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Searching, Moving Beyond Google

Since I am new to the T4 team I would like to briefly introduce myself.  My name is Nancy; I am new to the district coming here from Osceola County Florida.  After years of classroom teaching I became a Media Specialist and now am bringing that technology training to the Jordan School District.  High School is my love, but I am happy to be here and willing to work with whomever needs help.  Research is a love of mine so you will see a definite “information literacy” bias in my postings.

With that in mind, when did “Google” become “Google-ing” and interchangeable with research, or looking something up.  It is wonderful and brings up a huge amount of information, but sometimes six million hits is more than I want and usually more than students can process.  I had a student once describe it to me "it's like shopping at Ross, a whole lot of 'stuff' and you may find something good. But when you find it you will be tired and have a headache".  With that in mind I will give you a couple of alternatives here and direct you to more.  Look them over, check it out. 

Quintura is a visual search engine. Good for visual learners or for narrowing a topic.  Good results with very little commercial sites. There are fewer results easier to sort and good images.


Clusty.com , organizes the top search results into topics or "clusters" for easier searching. Searches multiple engines.  Again, fewer but better results.

Search-cube is a visual search engine that presents web search results in a unique, three-dimensional cube interface. It shows image previews of up to ninety-six websites, videos and images.This is new and fun.

If you want to see more go to the web page on the T4 site… there are several other fun search engines. 

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