Research+and+search+engines

= Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research =

As we know, the Internet is a great place to find information on anything that sparks your curiosity. Likewise, the web is a great resource for students, but they need to know how to evaluate what they find and discern the good from the bad. That's where we come in as teachers. And to help us help our students, Microsoft offers us a free 37 page ebook titled Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research Skills. The ebook presents strategies for teaching Internet search skills and strategies for evaluating information. The ebook also links to many additional resources for teaching web search strategies. There are strategies and resources appropriate for students from in early elementary grades through high school included in the ebook. As you might expect, the ebook is heavy on references to Bing and other Microsoft products, but overall it is a good resource worth your time to download and read.

= Five Real-time Search Engines for You to Try = from Free Technology for Teachers by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne) Today at Edubloggercon the post-lunch session was labeled as a technology apps smackdown. A smackdown is organized as a fast-paced presentation of many tools by many people. Everyone takes a turn sharing for two minutes. I came to the session late and missed out on the chance to share three real-time search engines with the audience. Real-time search engines draw their results from popular social media services like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.

What makes real-time search results different from standard search results is that the most current links are given priority over older links. Real-time search is very helpful for finding information about the latest trends or news in a particular niche. Here are some real-time search engines that you should try.

Scoopler is real-time search engine that allows you to simultaneously search Delicious, Digg, Twitter, and Flickr in one place. Scoopler is quite simple, enter a search term and you'll find results from all four of those services. Results are sorted into two columns, "live" which provides the most recently shared links and "popular" which is based on the number of times a link has been shared.

Mashpedia is an interesting service that matches reference articles from Wikipedia to materials from other sources like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, and the web in general. The purpose of drawing materials from multiple sources is to provide users with a comprehensive view of news stories and reference topics.

NachoFoto is an image search engine designed to bring you the latest images from across the web on emerging trends and breaking stories. According to their whitepaper NachoFoto searches for images based on recency, image density on a webpage, inward links, and domain authoriy. What this means for people searching on NachoFoto is that they will see new photos before older photos, will find images from sites that frequently post new quality images, and find images from websites that are family friendly.

Faroo is a real-time search that offers a couple of options not found in other real-time search engines. Faroo allows you to sort your search results by current popularity or sort your results in a timeline format. Faroo also gives you the option to preview a link's content by hovering your cursor on the link without actually clicking the link. Finally, if you're following a topic, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for your search and be notified of new results as they appear.

Collecta is a real-time search engine designed to draw the latest links about any given topic from a variety of sources. Collecta draws its results from Twitter, YouTube, and various blogs and news websites. Collecta offers a free widget that you customize to search for particular terms and place on your blog or website.