Search_Engines

http://www.kidsclick.org/

KidsClick is a website search engine that was designed by librarians. It would be useful in the elementary school setting to help narrow search results for students, as well as, to keep the results kid-safe. I like how topics can be searched by subject or they can be narrowed down. It would also be helpful for those students who need the additional directions to research. I plan to use it with my second graders as we start researching famous citizens in history. Carrie Bresnehen

Search-Cube http://www.search-cube.com (Danielle Tissiere Ramirez)

This website is so amazingly visual! It begins looking much like the Google search page. You type in your search terms, hit enter and a world of visuals begin to appear. Colorful thumb print images begin appearing, forming a cube. The cube moves. You can hold the mouse over the pictures and a summary of the story appears on the right side of the page. You can see if it is a video link, newspaper article, etc... You can rotate and flip the cube by using the arrow keys. You can also manipulate the cube by holding shift and moving the mouse. Finally, you can open the information squares of your choosing by clicking on the thumb print image.

This site searches mostly Google, but is a wonderful change of pace and would be a fantastic tool for visual learners. It would be really neat to show the whole class on a projected screen. The results are very relevant and student friendly. I would absolutely recommend this site to students.

Ms. Freckles [] (Sheri Humphries)

This is a fascinating search engine with a very appealing home page. There are a number of options for searching including: blogsearchs, google, multiple searches, by file type, by domain, definition, new, etc. The site also offers pages for calculators, translators, and a superfilter. The site was created in the UK and is available in three languages: English, Swedish, and Chinese.

The site searches mostly Google but it uses appropriate searching criteria, in other words, it does the advanced part of the search is done for you.

SweetSearch [] (Sheri Humphries)

This search engine is designed for students and educators as it searches 35,000 websites that were approved by teachers and librarians. It also provides some other features such as SweetSearch4Me geared at elementary students, SweetSearch2Day as a learn-something-new-every-day page, SweetSearch Biographies includes over 1,000 biographies, and they have a page for Spanish speakers. It is however only a text based search engine and does not provide options to search just images, videos, etc. Despite that shortcoming, the results are very accurate and student safe.

www.kidrex.org (Karen Cool) KidRex is a new GoogleSafe search engine for younger kids. It is colorful and looks like it is written with crayon. One comment was that it was not totally safe and smart aleck kid proof with a too good for its own good spell checker. I put in all the bad words my middle school kids would come up with and even "chicken breast" which is blocked by our District. All were greeted by the words Oops Try Again. There is also a way for parents to report inappropriate sites and ways to have something remove. The date on it is 2011, it is by google and searches a lot of search engines and is updated daily.

[|http://www.askkids.com] (Cheryl Chittenden) -very safe/child appropriate -user friendly -a variety of resources -engaging activities/videos/games

[] Dogpile (Barbara Holland) -has option to filter search results (great for student safety/appropriateness) -compiles best results from the leading search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) and evaluates for most relevant to your search -time-saving Metasearch technology -easy to navigate -searches most multimedia

[|http://www.kidsclick.org] (Melanie Dulaney)

I found the KidsClick search engine via the awesomely kid-friendly, book promoting website SlimeKids.com!

Positive features:
 * colorful, appealing layout
 * easy to search by topic, Dewey Decimal number, or alphabetical
 * all articles/websites include a reading level (how terrific is that!!!!) and a notation about how many illustrations are included
 * articles and websites are vetted as child-friendly and should not be blocked by school filters

Drawback:
 * very limited database

[] (Irene Richardson)

This is what my 7 year old uses at home when he browses the internet.

>kid safe >user friendly >appealing lay out >has several browsing icons: games, music, movies, jokes, sports, horoscope, study zone, etc... >easy access to an online encyclopedia, thesaurus, maps, dictionary


 * I don't like that words have to be spelled correctly or no matches for a misspelled search query.

[] (Deanna Sylvia)

This is one of the search engines the librarian at my middle school recommends. It was also recommended at noodle.com -It is specifically for students. -All of the sites have been evaluated by Sweet Search -There are specific links to: teaching web research skills to educators and students, a search engine for emerging learners, biographies, and social studies -the URL is easy to remember - allows you to search within the links it gives you for specific words

[|http://www.goodsearch.com] (Ashley Nichols) Good Search - Donates percentage of revenue from ads to your favorite charity or cause - Choose your cause/charity and everytime you use the search engine, money is donated to them - Powered by Yahoo! so it provides pretty extensive search results - Can narrow search by images or video (although these searches don't count toward charity) - Main drawback (as far as using it in schools) is that I couldn't find any way to filter the results to make it safer for kids.

[|http://www.mahalo.com] (Jessica Byrd)

Mahalo is considered a "human search engine" because it attempts to use human researchers in combination with computer algorithms. Some unique features of this search engine include:
 * It's a human search engine so it is more organic.
 * Provides "guides" that organize the most popular search terms.
 * If you are browsing through the "guides" and cannot find the one already created for your topic, you can request that one be made.
 * The categories are very diverse and include anything and everything from entertainment to weather to politics to humor and much, much more.
 * The web guides are very organized and can be searched by topic. The guides are very colorful and grab the user's attention.

[|http://yippy.com] (Shelia Potter)

I like this meta search engine. It has results along with clusters of results. It offers clouds, sources, sites, and time. It can help a student narrow his or her search based on the research that they need without having to sort through pages and pages of results.

[] (Cindy Pearson) An American History search engine for students in grades k-12. The site contains more than 138 million artifacts, including digital documents, photographs and webcasts. A great place for anyone researching American History or Government. The reading level of the material is suitable for kids in grades 6-12, but younger students can make use of the archived photos and documents.

[|www.quintura.com] (Allison Salgado) This website makes your searches look fun by using a visual map to show topics. However, it is also very useful. You can search for a topic and it will show you topics that relate to what you searched. You can also search images and videos only. [|www.quinturakids.com] is also very cute and it is designed just for kids, but the results are very limited. It seems to be more for really young children. I liked quintura.com though and I found it very useful. When I searched for things to do in Texas, it gives you a worddle result that shows you that most of the things to do are in Austin. I thought that was useful.

Dib Dab Doo and Dilly too....(Genevieve Orozco) http://www.dibdabdoo.com/ This website states it is a safer way for kids to surf the internet. The site was started by a dad who has 4 children and one day his daughter was searching the internet using the words "groovy chick" and as you can imagine inappropriate sites popped up. So he decided to start up a filtered search engine through google, the downside are the ads that have to be on the page but other than that it filters out inappropriate sites when children are searching. There are many categories to click on and once you click on it and type in a keyword it will populate a long list of sites that might be helpful. I like how if you see a topic that applies you don't have to type anything in just click the link and a list of websites pops up. I do not think this site is suitable for kids under 7 because they need to know how to read, but very usable for 7 and up. The graphics are some what appealing to children, again the only drawback are the ads it can confuse the kids if they are younger and overwhelm them. The author does state if the ads are not appropriate he will ask them to be removed.

[] (Lauren Robertson) Browsys.com is a search engine that pulls results from multiple sites. It pulls up search results for the ubiquitous Google, but also from Bing, Twitter, Youtube, Google Blogs, and DuckDuckGo. This provides a wide range of places for students to look without having to go to each search engine individually, instead all the student has to do is click on the tab at the top of the page and they can easily navigate between the different search engiens. By consolidating the results from many different places students can compare search results and find out which engine and which word combination gives them the best results for their inquiry. You can also create your own folders to personalize searches and sites that you use frequently. Browsys.com does not cater towards children, but provides a good learning experience by allowing them to look at many different search engines at once so they can see the big picture in terms of search results and start to understand how and where to search.

Duck Duck Go http://duckduckgo.com/ (Katherine Colvin) This website is very clean, similar in style to Google. One thing I really like about it is that it includes logos from the various websites (like blogger, ebay, etc) so that I can quickly navigate to or ignore certain results. It also has the ability to bring up images from Google or Bing, and also lists results from Amazon that might be relevant (like books on my topic) in the right-hand bar. There is also the ability to completely customize the look of the search engine, including color, size of results bars, and size of font. You can change protection settings, and you can specifically define ambiguous terms to mean exactly what you wish. The most attractive reason to use this search engine is for its privacy settings, which are also completely customizable. The search engine does not collect information in any way about what you are searching for or what you are doing on the web, which has become a problem with some search engines, who then sell this information to commercial companies.

Yippy (Emma McDonald) [|http://www.yippy.com] Yippy offers a clean opening page with a very large colorful logo featuring a cloud. Below is a menu button that, when pressed, allows users to do more than just search. You can learn more about Yippy, join, look at social media sites, view and play app widgets, and more. Users also have the option to choose the medium through which they are viewing the search engine - desktop, tablet, or mobile device. Searching for a topic leads to a unique results page. There are two columns, a narrow left column and a wide right column. The left column has multiple tabs for cloud, sources, sites, and time. The cloud tab contains synonyms or other related topics to help visitors narrow their search results. For example, when searching the term "Christopher Columbus," the left column showed topics such as facts, pictures, school, voyages, ships, kids, navigator, books, and more. Clicking on the plus tab next to one of the terms highlights it in red and lists pages found under that subtopic. The sources tab shows the major website sources for the results and the sites tab compiles the results by .com, .biz, .org, and so on. The time tab categorizes results by the date posted (90 days, 1 year ago, more than 1 year ago). There is also an option, very easy to see, to enlarge the font for easier viewing. I like that feature! The right column shows definitions of the word first, then an encyclopedia result, then other website results. The search term "Christopher Columbus" did not return any definitions, but the term "Molecule" returned multiple definitions. Searchers can also click on a link to "more encyclopedias" to only view results from various online encyclopedias. I really like the fact that you can narrow your topic or simply explore topics through various angles. This search engine really allows for inquiry and exploration.

Although this search engine does not filter, when I typed in the word "breast" as another student did, most of the results that appeared showed medical definitions and spoke about cancer related issues. I did not see any porn or other inappropriate sites listed on the first page. However, this does not mean that the sites are not listed at all, so caution should be used.

The Search Engine List Comprehensive List of Search Engines [] [Karim Aldridge Rand]

While I'm not sure in the context of this assignment if this would count toward the selection of a "search engine" per se, I, nonetheless, strongly believe that The Search Engine List would be extremely useful for all parties concerned. I say this because it is like the portal to the vast universe of search engines. This site lists the types of search engines, the name of the search engines relative by type (common search engines grouped in the same category), and an annotation of that particular search engine. This could save a lot of time and energy. So, for instance, if I wanted to find a search engine/engines that can answer a historical question say, When was the California gold rush? I would scroll down to the Question & Answer section and then select from any number of search engines available in that category - About.com; Answers.com; ASK; AskMeNow; AskWiki; and BrainBoost just to name a few.

[|www.boolify.org] I found this new search engine. I liked how this was a visual picture using puzzle pieces that allows you to change the search elements and then get instant results even with complex concepts. It was simple and easy to use. You can save your searches and view your searches. It would be fun for kids because it allows them to be interactive with the picture icons. Linda Forshage