3/12/2011

Reengineering the search engines...a must in the era of overwhelming information

It is completely overwhelming to be immersed in the technological world and deal with the astoundingly growing amount of information that is available nowadays. As a heavy information user, I find myself swimming in this sea of data (text, images, videos, blog posts, podcasts,etc), and most of the time I spend while searching the resources I want to incliude in my classses is filtering among the search results from the different seach engines I use according to the nature of queries.
I have come up to summariza search engines depending on their specialty. Even though using multiple and specialized search engines is a great help, it has always been an incomplete experience.
I just enjoyed what is the new experience of search engines mixed up with a spreadsheet feeling of information classification.

Google Squared is one of the new services Google is offering for those of us who enjoy browsing through the vast oceans of information.
It gives you a new dynamic process when searching ands classifying your information. It certainly reduces your searching time and extends your options. You can add criteria by adding columns to enrich your search results.
I encourage you to incorporate it into your searching experience. Take a look at the following video:




Here are some of the search engines I use and recommend:

METASEARCH Engines:
www.mamma.com
www.dogpile.com
www.ixquick.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.izito.com
www.faganfinder.com

IMAGE Search Engines:
www.compfight.com
www.taggalaxy.com (Great to be used with an interactive whiteboard)
www.tineye.com
http://elzr.com/imagery
www.pixsy.com

OTHER Search Engines:
www.soople.com (Easy expert search)
http://4me.sweetsearch.com/ (Sweet search 4 me)
www.ipl.org (Libraries' search engine)
www.rollyo.com (Customizable search engine)
www.blackle.com (Energy-saver search engine powered by Google)
www.2lingual.com (Bilingual Search engine)

I hope these search engines are of good use for you as a teacher or internet user.
If you have additional search engines, please contribute and post a comment.

This is an addition to the organization search engines can give you. I want to include Google Wonderwheel. It is a very graphic way to organize the information you're searching. I recommend you the post from Alan Simpson's blog, One year in the life of an English teacher. Here one of the images he used:



3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link to my blog, Gerardo. Sorry I've only just dropped by.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had not heard of Google squared until I found your blog. Seems like a great academic resource to use along with Google scholar. Any idea of Internet Marketing Companies have worked their way in to it yet? Thanks for posting!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Excellent pieces. Keep posting such kind of information on your blog. I really impressed by your blog.

    ReplyDelete

 
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