Thing 9: Search Tools Ninja

Back at it - I've been poking around at a bunch of the topics, but always got distracted before I wrote a blog... and of course in the interim I lost my train of thought.


But not this time!  This time I went down the rabbit hole and found my way back out again...


I decided to dive right in and test out the various search engines listed.  I fought against error messages ("Million Short" didn't work for me, which was a bummer, because the idea of searching the dusty forgotten corners of the web by slicing off the top searches really intrigued me).  I found cool ways to avoid having my search history sold away from me through DuckDuckGo (topical! but uninspiring).  I found a great time sink that would be great for pop culture or journalism class (Global Trend Tracker... seriously, I barely peeled my way away from this.  It's dangerously distracting, but could be a great way for students to track the trends or find topics to write op-eds about).  I sunk myself into differentiation opportunities through Choosito (a great way to find thematic sources at differentiated levels).  Crawling my way through the dust and detritus I found the light of day at the other end.


And I now know search-fu - AND I think I know how to teach it as well.



 I've always been the search ninja in my household and in the classroom, able to quickly filter through and find resources, while others get lost in the flurry of sites and distractions.  Subconsciously, I am good at finding key words that help organize the tidal wave of information in the web, to pare down searches using secondary words and delimiters.


And now I found a way to visualize that process and teach it intuitively.


Cluster search engines group search results using secondary key words, helping you to parse the information and find what you were really looking for (even if you didn't realize it in the first place).  Both http://yippy.com/ and http://search.carrotsearch.com/ accomplish this task, but I found the Carrot search much more intuitive.


Yippy groups everything up, but it's pretty intimidating there are all kinds of nested lists to navigate.



Carrot has this nested list view as well, but more helpfully it has the ability to visualize in other ways.  I found the circle view most helpful (searching for teaching irony):

Here we can see the search results grouped by related keywords.  You can click on any slice of the pie to cut down the search to more specific subset.  What I find most attractive is the fact that it teaches you to be more specific about what you are looking for, and can even open up new possibilities to refine your exploration.


I'll be interested in seeing if this even helps in exploring the tools I use going forward in this exercise.  I have already shown it to my wife and look forward to integrating it into my lessons as well!