Sweet Search: Curated Search for Students

May 25, 2011

FindingDulcinea blows its own horn in its blog entry, “Why SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students.” Their project is actually a very good idea— I wish it had been around when I was educating my son.

SweetSearch is much more than “safe” search. Besides weeding out the inappropriate, the site also weeds out the non-credible, leaving students with a list of “cite worthy” resources that’s more readily usable than one provided from a traditional search engine. There’s even a version for elementary students, called SweetSearch4Me.

The write-up includes very illuminating example searches which compare SweetSearch, Google, and Bing results to queries on the “War of 1812” and on “Shakespeare.” I recommend checking it out.

We find it interesting that findingDulcinea has also brought in Yolink, which has been developing its own education search application. The article said:

“To enable students to better scan results to determine relevancy, we’ve partnered with Yolink. From a SweetSearch results page, click on the Yolink toolbar on the left side, and add a term to narrow your search. Yolink will then browse your original search results and show an expanded view of the results in which your additional term appears. Yolink then enables you to save excerpts of search results, with the source link, to a Google doc, Web-based email, or social bookmarking and sharing services such as Diigo, and to the citation generator Easy Bib.”

It’s refreshing to see technology being used for good.

Cynthia Murrell May 25, 2011

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