ETL 501 #4 Searching commentary

I really struggled with this week's activities. I guess it's evident that life-long learning includes persistant learning of how to search the web. I found all the activities frustrating and I know I will just have to keep plugging away at this skill.



Thermal pool at Rotorua, NZ.
Source: B Montgomery

Search Engines I tried searching for volcanoes and teaching on some "other" search engines. The WorldFact Book was the first one, run by the CIA no less, so I got out of there quickly. Intute was the second one I tried, which closed down last year. It only revealed one video resource. Next I chose Bing and selected only Australian  sources. It came up with a range of sites featuring facts and lesson plans, handy stuff for a teacher.

Google Advanced Search The first problem I encountered was how to get to Google Advanced, there was no direct click that I could find. I had to type in "advanced search". Once there, I put in Ysabel, an island in the Solomon Islands and found when I added Solomon Islands I came up with lots of sites. Similarly when I looked at Google Images. Google Maps was disappointing. It only showed the USA or Philippines. I found Google News really useful. So many relevant and interesting 'local' news items. Similarly Google Books just blew my mind. So many books... a relevant page just a click away. I couldn’t find Google scholar.

I liked the file type option to find powerpoint files. This is all really new to me and will be very useful in future. I’ve downloaded Google Earth to play with when I get some spare time.

Knowledge 2.0 I checked out Twurdy and put in the topic of 'stick insects'. It didn't seem to have what it professed in terms of suitable reading ages. The basic sites listed didn't seem very basic to me. Ask Kids was good. I like this search engine as the sites are more suited to middle-grade kids.

I had trouble using KidsClick, the links kept breaking. At this stage I was starting to go a bit demented.

The 7 habits of effective Web Searching I like these habits. I’m already onto the time limit thing and now I’m exploring more search engines. This will take more baby-steps though. I do find all this a bit challenging.

Search engines activity table

Search engine	Keywords	Hits	How useful?	Comments
Bing	Causes and effects of drought in Victoria	69,200	Not sure	Don’t get it
Google Advanced	Causes and effects of drought in Victoria	14,300,000	Chose intermediate reading level and limited it to 220 Thous.	Don’t get it.
Dogpile Metasearch	Causes and effects of drought in Vic	I got sent to Ask! and couldn't locate how many hits. Am I blind?	Too vast obviously.	Still don’t get it.
Yahoo!	Drought in Victoria	530,000	This was probably as good as Google advanced	Going mental!