The findingDulcinea Blog

A Search Engine for Educators

Three years ago, we introduced SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students. It is a bold concept – a human curated search engine that searches only Web sites that have been evaluated by research experts. We didn’t apply an algorithm or a filter – we created a whitelist of 35,000 Websites. Reviewers have uniformly praised SweetSearch as an outstanding tool for students.

After we launched, we learned of another group of people that may actually appreciate SweetSearch even more – educators. We continually monitor Twitter and education list serves to learn about the specific search needs of educators, and to make sure we meet those needs. The response has been gratifying:

 

See many more Tweets by educators about SweetSearch.

Teachers are learning that if they search in our reliable universe of sites, they can quickly build their lesson plans, find blogs and advice from fellow educators, and discover primary resources, which are hard to locate using the internal search function of sites such as The Library of Congress or National Archives.

To see typical results for yourself, take a look at the results for these representative terms, then compare them to the results of Google and Bing:

Holocaust

Differentiated Instruction

War of 1812

Shakespeare Sonnets

World War II

 You'll likely find, as Paul Gilster, a technology journalist, wrote in the News Observer about SweetSearch: “Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality....I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.”

SweetSearch has integrated Yolink, a tool that highlights keywords, showing where the term is used and in what context, so that anyone can quickly scan a search results page and easily determine which results will be most helpful for a particular task. See how quickly you can evaluate the full first page of 20 results! The search terms and surrounding context can then be saved, with one click, to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, or a social bookmarking service. So you not only can find what you’re looking for in seconds, but you can be sharing it with colleagues moments later.

For Open Education Resource platforms to succeed, they need to be as easy for educators to use as possible. It's not enough to give educators a long, aggregated list of relevant resources of varying quality; the resources need to be expertly curated, and there must be a function for educators to search within these resources.

That is what SweetSearch provides, at no cost.

 

  

 

 

Mark Moran

CEO

Stop Searching, Start Finding

Dulcinea Media Announces A Book About Teaching Web Research Skills

February 5, 2013 – New York, NY – Schools in the United States spend literally billions of dollars every year on Internet access to the more than 15 million computers in schools.  Much of this money is wasted because not enough time is invested in teaching students and educators how to use the Web to research effectively - a critical skill for 21st century workers.

Studies have consistently shown that most students cannot effectively find information online, evaluate it, and put it to use. Recent studies show that many educators, who are overburdened by ever-growing paperwork and standardized testing, have, like most adults, not fully developed their own web research skills. Researchers now warn of a new digital divide, between students who do receive effective web research training and those who do not.

To help educators counter this new digital divide, Dulcinea Media, Inc. will release in March 2013 "Stop Searching, Start Finding," a research-based, multimedia tutorial that teaches effective web research skills to both educators and students.

Please view our video explaining the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial.

Alternatively, view our SlideShare presentation, without the voiceover.

Lastly, click here to preview the educator version of the tutorial.

The company plans to release several versions of the Tutorial:

• For K-12 educators, titled “Stop Searching, Start Finding;”
• for students in Grades K-6, titled “How to Be a Rock Star Researcher;”
• for students in Grades 7-12 and college, titled “Stop Searching, Start Finding: Get Better Results in Half the Time;” and
• versions of the above titles for Spanish-speakers 

The planned full release schedule is as follows:

• the educator version will be available in March 2013;
• the version for older students will be released in March 2013;
• the version for younger students will be released in September 2013.

The Company will also release additional information about the Web Research Tutorial, in accordance with the above schedule, through its blog.

Composition of Tutorial: 

Stop Searching, Start Finding is published as an electronic video book, with 16 chapters. Each chapter offers an introduction, a 3 to 5-minute video, a print guide to the topic, links to expertly curated third-party resources, and a self-quiz to help the viewer evaluate retention of the core concepts in the chapter. Each chapter builds upon, and reinforces concepts taught in the previous chapter. The company is also creating posters, glossaries and other visual elements to aid learning.

Chapter titles include:

• Planning and Adjusting Your Research;
• Using Special Search Functions;
• Finding and Using Primary Sources;
• Why Did the Author Write This;
•  Thinking Critically; and
• Synthesizing Your Sources

The content engages the reader and respect the way people learn best today. Unlike many professional  development systems that involve a lengthy, one-time presentation with little follow-up, Dulcinea Media’s tutorial offers a self-directed program of video tutorials, with several types of supporting materials and frequent follow-ups.

Dulcinea Media will update the book twice a year to incorporate new developments in web research and to leverage new learning tools.

Summary of Research Basis for Tutorial:

A 2006 report by the Educational Testing Service found, “students can use technology for socializing or entertainment but still have problems finding information, evaluating it and then putting it to use.”[1] Authors of a 2010 Northwestern study of college students reported that “students’ level of faith in their search engine of choice is so high that they do not feel the need to verify for themselves who authored the pages they view or what their qualifications might be.” [2]

Many other studies have similarly concluded that students do not know how to search the Web effectively, and struggle to synthesize multiple resources. Furthermore, no consensus has emerged on how to teach students Web research skills. [3]

Stop Searching, Start Finding is based on: (i) a thorough analysis of research studies of the habits of both skilled and inexperienced web users [4]; (ii) input from leading educators; and (iii) the research habits of the staff members of findingDulcinea, who have collectively written thousands of articles that effectively synthesize the best online resources about a topic.

Pricing: 

The annual license cost per school for Stop Searching, Start Finding is based on total student population:

 

Student pop.	Annual Pricing
1-249	$719
250-499	$919
500-749	$1099
750-999	$1269
1,000+	$1399

 

All versions will be made available to all scholls purchasing the tutorial.

Pricing does not include the option for an in-person or virtual presentation by a Dulcinea Media staff member or consultant, for which an additional fee, and reasonable travel expenses will apply.

The license term is for one year and may be renewed annually.

Schools may acquire a permanent license with a one-time payment equal to 4x the annual fee.

Standards Alignment:

Stop Searching, Start Finding aligns to the Core Common State Standards for English and Language Arts. In particular, it addresses the standards relating to:

• conducting research projects based on focused questions;
• tailoring searches online to acquire useful information efficiently;
• gathering relevant information from multiple print and digital sources;
• assessing the credibility and accuracy of each source; and
• integrating the information while avoiding plagiarism. 

The book also aligns to standards set by ISTE, the ALA, and NCTE/IRA.

Delivery of Tutorial:

The e-book will be web-based, accessed through password protected accounts. In coming months, it will also be made available as an app on the iPad, iPhone and Android phones.

Ordering Information:

Please email info@DulcineaMedia.com or call (917) 597-3815 to discuss ordering the Stop Searching, Start Finding.

_______________________________

[1] Paul D. Thacker, “Are College Students Techno Idiots?” Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2006 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/15/infolit

[2] Debra Viadero, “Collecting Evidence,” EdWeek, March 29, 2007 http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/03/29/30tcresearch.h26.html

[3] Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristin Yates Thomas, Northwestern University, “Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010), 468–494 1932–8036/20100468 http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636

[4] Anne Aula, Rehan Khan and Zhiwei Guan, “How does Search Behavior Change as Search Becomes More Difficult?” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010 http://dub.washington.edu/pubs/215

 

A Study of Students Online Research Behavior

In January 2010, Dulcinea Media created a survey to assess the online research skills of middle school and high school students in New York State.  With the help of several school librarians and classroom teachers, we surveyed 300 students at nine schools about their research habits.  After analyzing our results, we published our report on the findings and implications of our study.  Download StudyStudentsOnlineResearch

 The majority of students in our study have access to computers at school and at home.  Three-quarters of those surveyed self-describe as “excellent” or “very good” at search.  Nevertheless, most middle school and high school students cannot adequately explain their search strategies, or how they evaluate a website’s credibility.

 At the middle school level, when querying a search engine, more than half of these students use “natural language” instead of keywords.  It appears likely that many simply copy the question or problem assigned by their teachers into a search engine’s search box.  When initial search results are unavailing, both middle school and high school students simply “keep trying” or “re-word” their queries, but they cannot adequately explain their methods for doing so.

 When they do locate a source they deem useful, roughly one-third of middle school students report choosing it because it “looked good,” “sounded good,” or has “the correct information.”  One middle school student’s approach to assessing information boiled down to, “if it’s what my teacher told me to find.”  In other words, once students find “the answer” they seek, they spend little effort considering the credibility of a resource.

 When we asked students how often they evaluate the author of a document or website, or the date it was published, the majority of respondents answered “rarely or never.”  In the comment box, one student notes, “It doesn’t really matter who the writer is.”  As for the date an article was published, another student writes, “I can’t find it.”

Our survey suggests that students’ Internet research skills are far from adequate. All students must learn how to construct a query and evaluate the results, how search engines function and how to develop consistent habits or workarounds in response to poor result listings. Acquiring sound search strategies as well as critical evaluations skills while they are still in school will better prepare these students for college and their future careers.

In Summer 2011, Dulcinea Media will introduce the SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial, a comprehensive, multimedia approach to teaching students, and educators, how to use the Web to conduct research effectively.

21st Century Activities for Women's History Month

This week, I scoured the Web for lesson plans and activities for Women's History Month. Few, if any, asked students to do Web research, demonstrate media literacy, synthesize multiple resources, communicate their findings in a manner that engages modern audiences, or share their project outside the walls of their school.

Below I suggest a few activities that will help students learn about inspiring women and seminal events in women's history, and also offer a learning experience that is relevant to the world in which they live and will one day seek to work. At the end of the post, we list our free resources to assist students in their work, and discuss an opportunity for students to publish their work.

Create a Timeline on Life.com

Life.com offers an extensive collection of photos from Life Magazine's legendary archives, as well as from Getty Images. It enables users to create and share a timeline of photos they select, and to write a caption for each photo. Here are four sample timelines about women in history. Caution: some of the photos on Life.com have adult themes, or may depict gore or violence.

Research Women's Firsts in 2010

History is not only what happened long ago; it is made every day. Two years ago, we partnered with The Women on the Web on "2008 Firsts for Women," a collection of women from all over the world who became the first of their gender to achieve something significant in 2008. One example was Brittany Cantazaro, who at the age of 19, had become New York Waterway’s first female ferry captain. Only a week after we published her profile, Brittany piloted the first ferry to rescue passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 after Captain Sullenberger landed it in the Hudson River. She exhibited wisdom beyond her years by cutting the engines of the ferry to avoid creating a wake that could have sent the plane's passengers plunging into the chilly water.

Have a team of students research and create "2010 Firsts for Women." In learning about women who are breaking barriers today, students will ponder why this is so, and gain a greater appreciation for those woman who broke barriers so many years ago.

A research tip: databases, which allow for more precise date targeting than any search engine, will be indispensible for identifying 2010's firsts for women.

Write a Series of Articles with a Common Theme, or Add to One of Ours

We've created a number of series of articles about women around a common theme:

• When we learned about Ada Lovelace, who created one of the world's first computer programs, we created a series of 6 Unsung Women who never got fair credit for their brilliant ideas, heroic deeds or extraordinary work, often due to prejudice, discrimination or the social mores of their time.
• Women who found their calling later in life often have the most unexpectedly inspiring stories. Last year, we again teamed with The Women on the Web to profile Late Bloomers, a handful of women who came into their own later in life, demonstrating the power of perseverance and the value of experience.
• In Women Who Dared, we recognized 15 women whose actions—in courtrooms, on buses, in polling booths and in planes—shattered the status quo. Through guts, grit and unyielding perseverance these women made a difference, raising our expectations for ourselves, our daughters, and our granddaughters.
• In Women of Honor: Writers Who Won’t Be Silenced, we honored five dissident writers whose lives and struggles enlighten and inspire us. One of the writers, Iryna Khalip, has since been arrested in Belarus and charged with criminal acts for speaking out against the government.

A class of students could develop a series of articles around their own theme, or write articles to add to one of our series.

On This Day Challenge

A student (or group of students) chooses a significant event from women's  history and uses the Web to research and gather information on the chosen event. Using critical thinking and analysis skills, the student then writes an article on the event, citing the Web sources. We provide specific instruction on how to write an On This Day article, and offer a dozen examples of events from women's history on this page.

Create Videos or Slideshows Instead of Articles

To create a video portrait of a woman or series of women, students could use a screen capture software product, such as Camtasia, to capture text, images and excerpts of videos of the women profiled, or a product such as Animoto to create a narrated video slideshow. Both products' websites offer extensive tutorials. In each case, students must conduct Web research, and then assemble the images, write a script, and create the end-product. The students' work could be displayed on a school website or their own blogs, or Teacher Tube or YouTube, and thus reach audiences across the globe.

Resources

To support students, we offer these resources:

• SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students,
• Ten Steps to Better Web Research,
• How to Avoid Plagiarism by Paraphrasing Correctly, and
• How to Synthesize Multiple Resources into an Article.

Opportunity for Students to Get Published

In the 21st century, everyone is a publisher. Students must learn to create work that is seen outside the walls of their school building. We'll happily publish on findingDulcinea any student work that you submit to us that links to excellent online resources and is well-written for the student's grade level. Alternatively, we'll publish a series of blog posts throughout the month that highlight and link to student projects on school or student Websites. Note also that the On This Day Challenge, discussed above, offers a more formal opportunity for students to get published and win prizes.

 

Sincerely,

Mark E. Moran

Founder & CEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conjunction with findingEducation, we've launched the On This Day Challenge. We're asking students to write articles about historic events by conducting online research, with chances to win gift cards and cash and have their work published on findingDulcinea.

Click here to read everything teachers need to know about getting involved in the project. You'll find a section on motivating students to participate, advice for writing and researching an On This Day article, tips for evaluating Web sites, an FAQ and more.

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search Skills of the Lost Generation

The New York Times Website reported today on "The Dirty Little Secrets of Search." It details how J.C. Penney manipulated Google’s search results to rank first for search terms such as ”dresses” and “bedding.” The article follows another NY Times article, "A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web,” which described how a crooked retailer’s Website ranked high in Google for "eyeglasses," because of links from highly critical Web postings.

In today’s article, Matt Cutts of Google defended his team’s efforts to combat search engine spam, noting that “[s]pammers never stop.” The article offers data that explains spammers’ persistence: on average, 34 percent of Google’s traffic goes to the No. 1 result, about twice what goes to No. 2 result.

Google cannot reasonably be expected to anticipate or immediately counter every scheme. The solution to this problem is not to shame Google into working harder to fight spam. The solution is education. Internet users must learn how to find information online effectively, so they are not as heavily influenced by the first search results on a single search engine. Unfortunately, study after study shows that the vast majority of Internet users, including college and high school students, cannot effectively use the Internet to find, evaluate and use the information they need in their daily lives. This is a much more profound problem than whose Website shows up first for "dresses" or "eyeglasses."

A 2008 survey commissioned by Yahoo! found that 85% of initial search queries fail to return the information users were seeking. A 2008 research review by the University College of London exposed as a myth the notion of a “Google Generation” of young people with native ability to find information online. In 2010, we conducted our own study of 300 high school and middle school students. When we asked how they knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were "if it sounds good" or "if it has the information I need." Two-thirds of students said they “rarely” or “never” check the author or date of an article, with some adding that “it doesn’t matter who wrote it” and “you can never find the date.”

An article in Inside HigherEd last fall laid bare how dismal the research habits of college students are. The article reported on a presentation by Andrew Asher, who had studied the search habits of more than 600 Illinois college students, nearly all of whom reported relying heavily on the first few results on Google for their research. He quoted a sophomore biology major: “I’m just trusting Google to know what are the good resources.” And yet Asher reported that “of all the students that I interviewed, not a single one of them could give an adequate conceptual definition of how Google returns results...The word 'magic' came up a lot."

Asher’s findings sync with the conclusions of the 2008 University College of London research review. It reported a "new divide," finding students who had access to effective research training from librarians in high school "taking the prize of better grades," with those who didn’t have such access showing up at college "beyond hope," having "already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to 'get by' with Google."

That many college students are “beyond hope” was echoed by three college librarians in the Inside Higher Ed article. A Seton Hall librarian told Inside Higher Ed that "unless we can demonstrate some measurable payoff to searching, students aren’t going to do it."

How much does the unwillingness of students to learn research skills contribute to what experts call a “lost generation” of chronically unemployed, or under-employed, workers, resulting from a mismatch of workers' skills and employers' needs? Would you pay someone to do "research" for you that consisted of summarizing the first links on Google? Or would you instead hire one of the few people on the other side of the "new divide," who knows how to find the best information available anywhere?

Will this "lost generation" phenomenon continue with current students? Our experience suggests that, for many, it will. Dulcinea Media is continuing to develop SweetSearch and our other tools and content that help educators teach students how to use the Internet effectively. While reviews of our products are almost unanimously glowing and their use is growing nicely, a barrier to their wide adoption by schools is the status quo - textbooks and other crude tools from the 19th century that remain the primary method by which students learn.

We realize that most classroom teachers generally lack the time and experience required to teach intensive online research skills, and thus school librarians play a critical role in preparing students to succeed in the current marketplace. Yet around the world, many school librarian positions are coming under the axe as school boards begin to consider next year's budgets.

Conversely, we've come across hundreds of schools with very strong library programs that anchor a true 21st century curriculum that teaches students the skills they'll need to succeed in the workforce. We're encouraged that our presentation on teaching Web research skills has been downloaded 21,000 times in four months, and is being taught as part of the curriculum at colleges of education and library science. Students who learn these skills will become the eventual political and business leaders of our world; students who don't will continue to get tripped up by scammers who finagle a high position in Google's search results.

Mark Moran

CEO

 

 

Why SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated as credible by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants.

SweetSearch searches a "whitelist" comprised only of these 35,000 links, as well as sites we uncover by sifting through recommendations of librarians and teachers on their blogs and social bookmarking sites. You know those great lists you've been bookmarking for years? Well, SweetSearch is a giant, searchable repository of them.

It's likely that, had we sat down at the beginning to find a list of 35,000 credible sites, we would not have done it nearly as well as we did by instead finding, evaluating, organizing and annotating hundreds of Web Guides to the best 25-75 sites about a particular subject, or the best 5-8 sources about thousands of events in history, famous people, or timeless news topics.

We constantly evaluate the search results in SweetSearch and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities. We do more than merely exclude spam sites; we also exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not cite worthy.

For a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch from top educators, see our media kit; to add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch; or get a widget for SweetSearch, to  embed it on your school Web site.

For younger learners, we've recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites.

(Please note that SweetSearch4Me is the only variant search engine; our landing pages for School Librarians, Social Studies Teachers, Biographies, etc. do not contain their own versions of SweetSearch; they all highlight particular content from findingDulcinea and other sites that are useful to the target group, but the search engine included is the original version of SweetSearch).

Technology journalist Paul Gilster wrote in his column in The News Observer, "Search here and you're working in a universe of checked, verifiable sources and solid information.....Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality...I was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials."

Our favorite review came from an impressive member of our target audience - Amanda, who blogs as "Farmgirl Writes," and deemed SweetSearch "an amazing search engine," and explained,

"Within a half-an-hour, I was ready to type my essay, wondering why I'd wasted a half a day searching with Google and EBSCOhost. (Sorry Google. I still love you - just not for research anymore.) Why didn't I discover this before? If I had known about Sweet Search at the beginning of World History, I think I would have saved myself hundreds of hours of research."

Many articles that may be 3, 5, or 10 years old - but are still the most authoritative writing on the subject - are treated as stale by other search engines, and yet appear on the first page of SweetSearch results.  And to most students, the first page is the only one that exists. 

 The result? As Amanda wrote, students find what they need, and they find it faster. When my generation was in school, the librarian pointed us to pre-screened resources on our general subject, and we decided which ones were the most relevant to our specific research project. That’s what SweetSearch does for students with online resources. 

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.

Together, SweetSearch, Yolink and EasyBib are utterly transforming Web search for students, from something they can barely use to something they can use quite effectively.

 Of course, students still need to follow the principles laid out in our Ten Steps to Better Web Research by, among other things, formulating good search queries, and often looking past the first few results to find the very best ones. Another principle is to use more than one search engine, as not even we use SweetSearch exclusively - when we research an article, we start with SweetSearch and usually find substantially all we need there, but then we always cross-check against other search engines and databases, and so should your students. To facilitate this, SweetSearch includes a toggle option to view the search results from Google. 

But enough of the "press release."  Let's take SweetSearch for a test-drive. We'll compare the results for "War of 1812" on SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Many of the results returned by Google and Bing aren't quite up to snuff for including in a school paper. Wikipedia ranks first on both engines. While many people find Wikipedia a good place to begin their research, most educators are frustrated that students use it almost exclusively, and not wisely.  For this reason, Wikipedia almost never shows up in SweetSearch results.

For "War of 1812," the second result on Google is "Gateway New Orleans," which includes a brief summary of the war by an unknown author. The purpose of the site is to promote tourism in New Orleans, not to promote scholarship on the War of 1812. And both search engines prominently display a link that contains a teaser summary of the war by Gala Films, whose purpose is to get you to buy a movie.

Both of these sites rank so high because general commercial search engines display recently published content high in its results, since many times that is what the user finds most relevant. But when it comes to a war that ended nearly two centuries ago, recently produced material has little advantage over the “classics.” 

Both search engines also prominently feature "Warof1812.ca," and "Warof1812.net," likely because of the specificity of their domain names. The first offers a lot of material written by two people, whose credentials are not provided. The site contains no "About Us" section, and its primary purpose is to sell products relating to the war. The second is the result of a long-abandoned project to put student material on the Internet; it's primary purpose now seems to be to drive you to search the topic yourself on Google.

On the first page of SweetSearch's results, you'll find precisely the Web sites that a teacher wants students using. The first result is the Library of Congress' entire collection of primary source documents on the War of 1812. The second is a comprehensive ThinkQuest created by students under the supervision of teachers and professors, followed by sites from the National Archives and the U.S. Military.  Four sites in the next group—an Indiana University site about the political cartoons of the War of 1812, a Long Island University site about African-American Freedom Fighters, a Smithsonian site about the Star Spangled Banner, and the Avalon Project of Yale University—are sites that students could use to solidly distinguish their work from that of their classmates. Where are these results on Google and Bing? Scattered through the third to seventh results pages.

Now let's do a comparison for "Shakespeare" in SweetSearch, Google and Bing.

Again, Wikipedia ranks first for Google and Bing. Also appearing prominently, again due to the specific domain names, are "Shakespeare.com" and "Shakespeare-online.com." Each of these is a well-written "passion site," one created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not possess academic credentials that would enable a student to rely on the sites when writing an academic paper. Each engine also contains several sites that are only about selling products.

On SweetSearch, you again find some outstanding academic resources, many of which are buried in Google or Bing. These include sites from the Library of Congress, the British Library, PBS and Project Gutenberg.

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by commenting below or by e-mailing us at Mark[dot]Moran[at]DulcineaMedia[dot]com

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

 

Why SweetSearch's Results Are Much Better Than Those of Blekko

We warmly welcome a new entrant to the field of human-curated search - Blekko. It has gotten a trove of publicity from its formal launch today, with articles on the Websites of WSJ, NYT, Wired.com, The Next Web, the Atlantic, and many others.

You might not expect us to welcome a new "competitor," but that would be narrow-minded. The only "competitor" we worry about is the status quo. The vast majority of search users use Google only, and either don't know or don't care that the search results often do a poor job of providing them with the information they need. So we welcome the attention a new entrant brings to this issue. We also know that the search market is so vast that one more entrant won't be a barrier to our eventual success, in light of the significant inroads we've already made, particularly in education.

Blekko also doesn't worry us because we've compared its results to those of SweetSearch, and, just as we concluded in a head-on comparison to Google and Bing, we found that SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Blekko for research-oriented queries. This includes not only the types of searches made by students and teachers, but anyone who is trying to get a comprehensive view of an issue.

To be clear about one important point: in Ten Steps to Better Web Research, we urge users to learn "the full toolkit" of search options. We note that not even we use SweetSearch 100% of the time. There are instances in which Google, Bing, and surely Blekko will provide better search results. Think of these tools as complementary, not competitive, to one another, and use more than one on every serious research inquiry. Indeed, SweetSearch offers a "toggle button" to help you easily compare Google's results.

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated as credible by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants. For emerging learners, we've recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites.

We constantly evaluate our search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and universities. We do more than merely exclude spam sites; we also exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not cite worthy; many of these show up in Blekko.

For a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch, see our media kit; to add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch; or get a widget for SweetSearch, to  embed it on your Web site.

 

Enough of the "press release."  We'll compare the results for Sweet Search and Blekko for George Washington, Diabetes Complications, and Comet Hartley, the green comet that is currently making a close pass of the earth. I did not use quotation marks, since most search users don't.

For George Washington, Blekko returns 19 results on the first page; the first six include the homepage of George Washington University, the Wikipedia entry, the entry in IMDB about a movie that has no connection to the first U.S. president, a silly YouTube video, and user-generated content from Answers.com. A total of four of the 19 results provide credible information about the first president of the United States. Using a Blekko-suggested slash-tag, such as history, improves the quality and relevance of the results, but turns up very narrow entries about specific aspects of George Washington's life, not the broad overview someone searching his name would expect.

Now let's analyze the SweetSearch results. SweetSearch always displays two sets of search results - first, up to three results from findingDulcinea, and secondly, from the full index of 35,000 sites. This search produces stellar results from findingDulcinea, including a blog entry that discusses why George Washington has two birthdays, and a short profile that links to seven of the most outstanding Web resources about him, including a biography published in 1807, which you won't easily find using any other search engine. The "natural" results add his profile on Whitehouse.gov and C-Span's American Presidents, the documents collections of the Miller Center and the Library of Congress, entries from the LOC student site and other student-friendly sites, and a few recent news stories.

The results from Blekko for diabetes complications are all high-quality. Interviews with its founder indicate that Blekko searches only a universe of 150 Web sites for health queries. Ironically, we find this is too few; the results, while all credible, appear to be largely redundant. We estimate that SweetSearch indexes 1,000 health-focused Websites, and also searches the health content on thousands of mainstream media Websites, which complement the information provided by the health-focused sites. Thus, its natural search results for diabetes complications includes results from medical journals and news publications, as well as the outstanding blog "DLife," which collectively provide a more rounded view than the narrow results on Blekko. The findingDulcinea results all come from our Web Guide to Diabetes, and include four well-curated, synergistic links in the context of a narrated, organized guide that was created by a registered nurse and checked by an editor and quality assurance guru.

Of the first 20 results on Blekko for Comet Hartley, roughly six are well-written "passion sites," created by an individual who is passionate about the subject, but does not disclose any academic or journalistic credentials; these sites are fine if you are knowledgable about the subject, but otherwise you don't know whether you can trust the content. Additionally, seven of the 20 results are identical re-posts of NASA's press release that it is sending a spacecraft to rendezvous with the comet.

On SweetSearch, you find mostly outstanding results from credible resources, such as Sky and Telescope Magazine, EarthSky (created by top scientists), NASA, HubbleSite, Phys.org, and several news publications.

Please let us know what you think of Sweet Search! Write us at sweetsearch@DulcineaMeda.com

 

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO

Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research - Supplemental Materials

 TEACHING TEN STEPS TO BETTER WEB RESEARCH

The presentation on "Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research" is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. Where the footnoted material is available online, it may be accessed by clicking on the highlighted text below.

1. Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” : On the Horizon. NCB University Press, Vol. 9 No. 5, October 2001

2. Els Kuiper, Monique Volman and Jan Terwel. “Students' use of Web literacy skills and strategies: searching, reading and evaluating Web information.” Information Research: Vol. 13, No.3,  (September, 2008).

3. Shu-Hsien L. Chen. “Searching the Online Catalog and the World Wide Web.” Journal of Educational Media & Library Sciences, 41 1 (September 2003) 29-43

4. A Study of Students' Online Search Behavior, Mark E. Moran and Shannon A. Firth, April 30, 2010.

 5. On “Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society. February 24, 2010.

6.UCL. “Information behavior of the researcher of the future”: 11 January 2008.

7. Steve Kolowich, Searching for Better Research Habits, Inside Higher Ed, September 29, 2010

8.  Eisenberg, Mike. “What is the Big 6.” The Big 6: Information & Technology Skills for Student Achievement, (1997)

 9. “Research Skills.” State Library of Victoria. Ergo. (2010)

10. Media Post: Google Research Focuses on Search Failures, September 21, 2010

11. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea,” The New York Times, February 13,2005.

12. Eszter Hargittai etal, “Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web Content,” International Journal of Communications 4 (2010), 468-494, 1932-8036/20100468

Dulcinea Media

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

SweetSearch

SweetSearch4Me                                   

Yolink                       

Primary Sources?                      

Original Source?

Can’t Cite Wikipedia            

Who Wrote It?                                               

Why Did They Write It?                                               

When Did They Write It?

 

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Do not hesitate to contact our CEO at Mark [dot] Moran [at] DulcineaMedia [dot] com with any questions.

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

 

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

Dulcinea Media provides free tools and content that help educators teach students how to use the Web effectively.  These are discussed comprehensively in these two blog posts:

9 Ways We Help Educators Teach Students How to Use the Web

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The second post repeats a fair bit of the first, but adds specific insight into our content for social studies teachers.

These two posts above themselves link to just about everything else I'd want you to read about our company, but for your convenience, I repeat some of the most important and relevant links below:

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

Materials for Presentation at LISMA, Sept 29, 2010

I'm presenting today at the first meeting of the school year of the Long Island School Media Association, at Garden City High School, at 4 p.m..

Here are links to all of the materials that I will be presenting; I provide full contact info at the end.  

DULCINEA MEDIA'S PRODUCTS

One part of my presentation is a discussion of the free products offered by Dulcinea Media. These are discussed comprehensively in these two blog posts:

9 Ways We Help Educators Teach Students How to Use the Web

How We Help Social Studies Teachers Integrate the Web into the Syllabus

The second post repeats a fair bit of the first, but adds specific insight into our content for social studies teachers.

These two posts above themselves link to just about everything else I'd want you to read about our company, but for your convenience, I repeat some of the most important and relevant links below:

Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students

Transforming Web Research for Students

Ten Steps to Better Web Research

            Click here for widgets for SweetSearch and our other products.

Educators Will Create the Replacement for Textbooks

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY AND THE INTERNET IN SCHOOL

This presentation is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page, and are repeated below for your convenience.

Things that Keep Us Up at Night

Younger Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Angela Maiers: Learning Now

A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto

It's Broken, Let's Fix it: the Traditional Model of School Librarianship

Dalton Sherman, Dallas ISD

SweetSearch School Librarians

TEACHING TEN STEPS TO BETTER WEB RESEARCH

The presentation on "Teaching Ten Steps to Better Web Research" is a PowerPoint that I have uploaded to our account on SlideShare. The links contained in it can be opened by clicking on the slide page.

CONTACT INFO

Do not hesitate to contact me at Mark [dot] Moran [at] DulcineaMedia [dot] com or call me at (917) 597-3815 with any questions.

Sign-up for our free daily newsletter

"Like" findingDulcinea on Facebook

"Like" SweetSearch on Facebook

Follow findingDulcinea on Twitter

Transforming Web Research for Students

   

   

 

 

Today we introduce a significant change in the functionality of SweetSearch.

 

All search results pages on SweetSearch are now automatically enhanced by Yolink.

Together, SweetSearch and Yolink utterly transform Web research for students.

 

Studies show that students, even at the college level, rarely review more than the top three search results, and almost never look beyond six. Studies also show that most students lack the experience and wisdom to differentiate between credible results and misinformation.

 SweetSearch, enhanced by Yolink, enables students to review a long list of vetted search results, quickly zero in on the ones that are most relevant to their task, and then save those results to a Google Doc (with the link included), EasyBib's citation generator, Diigo, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Web-based email accounts, etc.

 Web research has been transformed, from a task few students could effectively tackle without close teacher guidance, to one that many students should be able to navigate on their own.

 The search results pages of other search engines display 10-20 words of context around the search term; in most cases, this is not nearly enough to determine whether a search result is truly relevant to your task.  As a result, most users click-through to every search result, in order.

 SweetSearch’s results, enhanced by Yolink, now show from 100-400 words of context around search terms. Each word in a multiple word query is highlighted in its own color. A searcher can, at a glance, scroll down through all 20 results shown on the first results page and determine which ones appear to be the most relevant, and then click through to them.

 SweetSearch is a Google-powered custom search engine that only searches 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts deemed credible. Awareness and use of SweetSearch is now growing explosively in schools throughout the world, garnering outstanding reviews from publications and education bloggers from the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

 Tech journalist Paul Gilster compared SweetSearch to Google and Bing and found it much better for finding authoritative resources. He wrote, “Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality….[I] was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.”

 SweetSearch provides students with a list of credible results, and Yolink helps them determine what’s relevant from this credible list, by providing the expanded view of the results.

 Let’s take a look at an example of how SweetSearch, enhanced by Yolink, greatly facilitates browsing through search results to find the exact document you need.

 Today I searched [Sacagawea children] on SweetSearch and Google. Both engines showed a link to a PBS documentary on Lewis and Clark near the top, that briefly discusses Sacagawea’s son and daughter.

 But SweetSearch’s results show full context around all of its results. In seconds, a student can glance through all 20 results on the first page, and quickly lock in on the 17^th result – the “feedback” page from the PBS documentary referenced above – which a Google user likely would never have found. The author of the documentary provides full detailed answers to questions, including “What Happened to Sacagawea’s Children?” which is highlighted in color on the search results page.  It is a concise answer from a noted expert on the topic – perhaps the best search result on the Web for this query – and it was found in seconds.

 

Yolink enables SweetSearch users to browse a list of 20+ credible results, quickly.  Using other search engines, students are met with a mix of credible and not so credible results, and rarely venture beyond the first three.

 For a full explanation of how we created SweetSearch, read “Why SweetSearch is the Best Search Engine for Students.”

 To add SweetSearch to the search options on your Web browsers, click on the "Add On" box on SweetSearch;

 Click here to get a widget for SweetSearch or SweetSearch4Me, to embed on your school Web site.

 Mark Moran

Founder & CEO