DIY Google June 18, 2008
Posted by jhurd in : Check this out! , trackbackIf you haven’t discovered it yet, Google has a useful new custom search engine that you can host on your own website. You create a name for the search engine, then manually enter the website URL’s that you want the engine to use in searching. Time consuming, yes. But what a great school-wide project, and imagine what a powerful tool you would have after a few years. There are also options to search the entire web, emphasizing your selected sites, or just to search the entire web.
Google then allows you to host the site on your Google homepage, your blog, or another website, and generates the embedding code. Nifty, eh?
I will admit that, as a high-school librarian, I have issues with using filtered search engines; students must learn to find and evaluate their own sites. Still, this has real potential, and I can see some wonderful content-specific possibilities here.
Departments can create a subject specific search engine, or teachers create a search engine for a specific topic of study. The History department at my school requires students to use a minimum of seven primary sources in their research papers. I spent an inordinate amount of time this year hunting links down for the pathfinders (have you ever had to find seven primary sources on Zulu warriors?!), and worried I was doing the students a disservice by finding the sites for them.
So I plan to create a primary source search engine with ALL of the links from the various pathfinders. Students still have to dig and root, but with better luck. They’ll even still need to distinguish between secondary and primary sources, as some of the sites are a mixture of both.
Really, you have to love Google, sometimes!
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