Learning Connections
Searchme Simplifies Searching
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Multidisciplinary
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By Kaya Hardin
Searching Google can be daunting if you're a kid who just wants to find out about tigers. Or a golf enthusiast wanting to read everything about Tiger Woods. Or a baseball fan looking for the score of last night's Detroit Tigers sgame. Punch the word tiger into Google, and you'll get 237,000,000 pages to choose from.
Type the word tiger into the new search engine Searchme, and these categories appear to the right of the search box: wildlife, golf, computer and video games, music, computer hardware, scouting, U.S. government, collectibles. Click on the appropriate category and you see images of actual webpages instead of a URL and text description à la Google.
Although this unique search engine will no doubt appeal to a varied audience, it has particular appeal to students. Searchme allows users to flip through the screenshots of the sites your inquiry has pulled up without actually visiting a particular page. This allows you to review the pages quickly to determine if they will provide the information you are looking for, bypassing long load times.
To simplify your search, Searchme provides categories such as web, video, images, music, and news with subcategories such as featured and entertainment. Users can create and save "stacks," which are pages containing information on specific topics. For example, if a student is trying to research a report on tigers, he would first enter his search term, then narrow it down by clicking on one of many categories, such as basketball, wildlife, or rugby. After choosing wildlife, which is represented by the word and an image of an animal, the student can flip through multiple pages to find those that look appropriate, saving time and simplifying his search. If he wants additional information, he can also choose to do a Twitter search from the same page.
Searchme provides a variety of save options, a customizable main page, and tools to create playlists, a mobile phone version, and fast results. On the downside, although Searchme comes up with numerous sites during a search, the overall number of results still falls short of the more popular search engines.
—Kaya Hardin is an ISTE intern. She graduated in the spring from the University of Oregon with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
Copyright © 2009, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education), 1.800.336.5191 (U.S. & Canada) or 1.541.302.3777 (Int'l), iste@iste.org, www.iste.org. All rights reserved.
Learning & Leading with Technology | September/October 2009
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