findingDulcinea

Finding The Real Source of Your Source

There is so much posting and reposting of content online these days, that it can sometimes be difficult to discover the true original source of a story.  Once a story becomes popular on the Web, thousands of copy cat stories crop up everywhere, often quoting or summarizing the original and not as often giving proper credit. The reason many stories online get sensationalized is because people just copy and recopy information from one source to another, without bothering to verify the source.

While using those less-than-reliable sources can be an easy way to read information, it can sometimes mean that the info you are getting (especially with a developing story) is dramatized or just incorrect. When doing any kind of research, you want to get as close to a primary source as possible.

So how can you find the true source of your information in a world overrun with automatic news aggregators? You have to use a little detective work.

First, evaluate the credibility of the source you've been sent.  Is it a trustworthy news source or publication, or is it a site filled with adwords and random content scraped from the web?  For tips, see our "How to evaluate web sites" from our On This Day challenge materials.

If you find that the source you're reading from doesn't look totally credible, look through the content of the story  and see if you can spot any attribution or links to an original piece. 

If that isn't available, try going to a news source you already trust and searching for some of your subject keywords to see if you can find a more reliable version of the story.

OR

If you think the story you read might be a copy from a legitimate source, try searching for an exact phrase from the story in a search engine by using quote marks.

If the news is about a person or organization, see if you can find their own web site for commentary or updates.

Video clips from YouTube or other video hosting sites can be tricky to locate the original source of.  Look for any kind of watermark or logo within the video itself to determine the original source. If you know what program the video came from, search on that network's site to see if it has been made available for the public. Unauthorized copies of videos are often removed after a short time, so using an unauthorized video clip in research may mean that you won't be able to refer to it later, it is best to find the original source if possible.

If what you are looking for is an older source, try looking in newspaper archives or library archives, you'll be surprised how much information is available to those who look a little deeper. 

And of course, primary source material is always your best bet, for places to go to find primary sources, read our blog post from a few weeks ago, "Discovering Primary Source Material."

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

A "Search Engine for Students" They Will Use Their Whole Life

This week, three members of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University—John Palfrey, Urs Gasser and danah boyd (who we profiled in our Educators that Rock! series)—issued a report, “Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape,” in response to an FCC inquiry.

The authors note that electronic media can “overwhelm youth with information that they may not have the skills or experience to evaluate.”  It suggests strategies that could address the “the information quality challenge that young users face,” including “[s]pecially designed and tailored tech-tools such as, for instance, kid-friendly browsers and search engines…or aggregators….”  But the report adds the caveat that “it seems unlikely that youth will embrace special search engines…developed just for them…. [I]t is far more probable that children will seek out the websites and tools that adults use—the websites and tools that they would eventually graduate to using anyway, as they grow older.”

The caveats confirm for me our strategy in developing and positioning SweetSearch.  Our content site, findingDulcinea initially offered a broad range of curated content.  By February 2009, we realized that users’ obsession with search was not going away, so we launched SweetSearch to enable users to search only the sites we had approved. When it became clear that students were the most loyal audience for both SweetSearch and findingDulcinea, we began to focus our content and marketing efforts on them. We repositioned SweetSearch as “A Search Engine for Students.” We also removed any Web sites that lacked journalistic or academic rigor, and added hundreds of sites with primary source material or educational videos; these efforts are continuing.

Over the past year, we’ve discussed our products, and the needs of students, with thousands of educators and students at events ranging from national conferences to one-on-one meetings, and have also reviewed thousands of school Web sites.  We’ve heard some outstanding feedback on SweetSearch and have seen a good number of widgets downloaded to school library Web sites, but we also appreciate constructive criticism that could help us improve the product. 

Some educators have expressed concern that SweetSearch does not block words from being searched, and returns results for sexuality-based queries, even though the links are only to information-based websites.  Many have encouraged us to develop a “SweetSearch for Kids” that would include only content appropriate, from both a subject matter and reading level perspective, for kids under 12.  Others have wondered if it’s not helpful to students to provide a curated search engine that deprives them of the experiencing of sorting through the vast mix of Web sites of uneven quality offered by general search engines.  Conversely, a good number of schools offer little advice to their students regarding appropriate Web sites, and prefer instead to direct them to licensed proprietary databases.

Students should sift through Google to sort the helpful and unhelpful Web site as an occasional exercise, just as boot camp instructors sometimes require their charges to run while carrying weights.  But as I explain in a previous post, in the pre-Internet days, the school librarian directed us to pre-screened resources on a subject, and then we decided which ones were the most relevant to our research. That’s what SweetSearch does for students using the Internet.  Students cannot efficiently distinguish good online content from bad until they have years of practice, and the wisdom and experience that comes only from age.  Students learn to write in part by reading a lot of well-written books; students who use SweetSearch extensively will begin to learn the names of the most useful Web sites.  And because SweetSearch, while focused on students, also offers a broad range of content, it will be, unlike databases and “kid friendly” search engines, one of “the websites and tools that they would eventually graduate to using anyway.”

This brings us to “SweetSearch for Kids.”  On the one hand, as the Berkman report suggests, “it seems unlikely that youth will embrace special search engines…developed just for them.”  While Ask for Kids, Yahooligans and KidsClick have all enjoyed some popularity and continue to appear on school library Web sites, I don’t find them to be entirely useful when my kids conduct Internet research. On the other hand, students in elementary school need to learn to recognize good content, and for them, useful content is not the same content that a high school student accesses.  So we do plan to launch a new version of SweetSearch in the next 60 days that will focus on the needs of elementary school students, and will meet those needs better than any other "kids" engine.  But you won’t see a “for kids” label anywhere near it.  What should we call it? I’ve put that question to my children and will ask their friends as well. But I suspect I may find inspiration from the labels in the row of energy drinks in the grocery store.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Moran

Chief Executive Officer

Olympic Athletes Compete With Technology

With these Olympic Games comes a whole new way to keep up with your favorite athletes. Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook have gotten much more popular and mainstream since the last winter Olympics. In fact, Twitter didn't even launch until March of 2006, and its number of users has grown exponentially since then.

So some are dubbing the 2010 Vancouver Olympics the "Twitter Olympics," because the athletes are more in touch with the everyday population than ever before. But is the constant communication and unedited flow of personal messages good for the Games and for the athletes' performances?

Gillian Reagan of the Business Insider points out that while there are rules and regulations regarding the information that athletes can publish about the Olympics, the easy access and widespread use of new technologies has presented some gray areas as far as what is allowable content for athletes to post. For example, the rules state that athletes can't "report" on events, ceremonies, behind-the-scenes happenings or other athletes, which makes it seem like they can't use social media tools during the Olympic Games at all. But later it seems that the rules were cleared up, and that athletes and personnel can post updates about the Olympics, just no updates, pictures or video during competition or the opening and closing ceremonies. The full rules can be found on the Olympic official Web site.

The Montreal Gazette reported that more than 80 of the 200 U.S. athletes have Twitter accounts, and coaches and others worry about the potential for distraction from the new tools. Psychologist Barbara Meyer, who is working with a few athletes in this Olympic Games, has advised some to stop using the social media tools during the Games to limit distractions. “Anything that increases anxiety or is a distraction has the potential to affect performance,” she told the Gazette. Some athletes have slowed down; for example, snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis hasn't been Tweeting for most of February (see her account).

But other athletes might be reluctant to stop tweeting and Facebooking. Some say they really enjoy the support they get from fans, and others like to be able to give supporters an insider view of some under-appreciated sports. 

And for those of us not in the Olympics, it seems undeniable that we enjoy having the access to the athletes. Skiier Lindsey Vonn has more than 56,000 followers on Twitter (see her account), and many other athletes have gained substantial followings during the last few months (see a list of U.S. Olympian Twitter accounts). It will be interesting to see what technology has in store for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

Let It Snow: Weather in the Classroom

To many students, bad winter weather means time off from school and time out of the classroom. This past weekend, The Associated Press reported that 49 out of 50 U.S. states had snow on the ground; that’s a lot of happy students.

But bad weather doesn’t need to be an impediment to a child’s learning. An impending storm can be the perfect segue into a lesson on weather. The Web has some valuable resources on the subject for teachers and students.

Teachers: Before instructing students on the finer points of weather science, refresh your own understanding with a visit to NASA’s World Book. The NASA entry on “Weather,” written with contributions from the extensively qualified Joseph M. Moran, Ph.D., discusses what causes weather, how it’s measured and how humans impact it.

Once sufficiently refreshed, visit the Discovery Education “Lesson Plan Library” for ideas on how to teach students about weather. You’ll find 12 lesson plans covering topics such as “Understanding the Weather,” “Mountain Barriers,” “Avalanche!” and “Hurricane!”

The BBC offers inquisitive readers a weather center with links to detailed explanations of natural weather phenomena; this is a good place to find answers to specific questions.

Curious how meteorologists generate daily forecasts? Hint: It’s more sophisticated than voodoo or trips to the local psychic. FindingDulcinea’s Nature Wages War series offers a look at how groups such as the World Meteorological Organization and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration predict both extreme and benign weather events.

Finally, Mark Twain's famous line that "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it" is no longer completely true. In "Seeding the Clouds for Drought Relief," findingDulcinea discusses efforts to control the weather by Venezuela (to end a drought), China (to ensure clear skies for the Olympics' Opening Ceremonies), and others.

James Sullivan

Editor

Why Does George Washington Have Two Birthdays?

This Monday is the federal holiday Washington’s Birthday, better known as Presidents Day, celebrated on the third Monday of February. If you want to know the actual birth date of George Washington, you will find two dates: Feb. 22, 1732, and Feb. 11, 1731. Both dates are correct.

What accounts for the discrepancy? When Washington was born, Britain and its colonies were using the Julian calendar. Developed in first century B.C. under Julius Caesar, it had three too many leap days per 400-year period. The Catholic Church corrected the error in the 16th century by introducing a modified calendar (the Gregorian calendar) and skipping 10 days.

The Gregorian calendar was soon adopted by Catholic nations, but non-Catholic nations, such as Britain, were slower to change. The British calendar was also unique in the fact that it began its year on March 25 rather than January 1.

Britain amended its calendar in 1751 and 1752. First, it decreed that 1752 begin on Jan. 1 rather than March 25, meaning that the year 1751 lasted only nine months and 1752 lasted 15 months. It then adjusted to the Gregorian calendar by dropping 11 days in September 1752 (Sept. 3-13).

Historians usually adjust dates in the Julian calendar to correspond to the modern calendar, thereby creating a discrepancy in Washington’s birth date and other historical dates. In the most famous example, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of November 1919 is known as the October Revolution because Russia was still using the Julian calendar.

Find the best biographical and primary sources for George Washington in his findingDulcinea profile.

Learn about Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is also celebrated in February.

Denis Cummings
Writer

A Visit to the Springfield Township High School Library

Through the glass doors of the Springfield Township High School Library, you can see a life-size cutout of Robert Pattinson, the lead actor in “Twilight,” standing on some shelves. Pattinson’s defiant presence, front and center, signals who runs this library: the students.

I walk in and spot Dr. Joyce Valenza, the school’s library information specialist, through another window, one that peeks into her office where she sits consulting with a student researcher. She apologizes for not being able to shake my hand (she has a cold), and welcomes me and begins telling me about some of the projects her students are working on.

She introduces me to her assistants Patty Gee and Casey Arlen, who rave about findingDulcinea, then the study hall students, who greet me politely, and the U.S. History II students who are focused on their computers.

Mr. MacFarland’s history students explain that they are creating an online textbook that covers material their textbook leaves out. Valenza reminds these students that the Google News Timeline and Fact on File’s World News Digest—one of many databases available to the students—are great places to begin their research.

She also reminds them about Dulcinea Media’s SweetSearch tool, which I’m excited to see is listed on her search page. I mention that our site also has a brand new Biographies page. A few minutes later I see two girls scrolling through a findingDulcinea profile of Michael Phelps.

In one darkened cove, a projector screen is lit up behind Mr. Alexander, who is giving directions to students researching their senior seminar. In another room, Mrs. Mazurek’s eighth-graders are comparing products online using Google Squared. The other half of Mr. MacFarland’s class, the half not creating textbooks, is watching a history movie that introduces a new unit; the area is often used for student presentations, Valenza explains. She guides me through the reference area, the magazines aisles and the student-run art gallery. Outside the gallery is more art: painted pottery dishes, medieval castles, models of the Great Wall of China and a life-size wire sculpture one student made of himself.

When we return to her office, Valenza shows me the keynote presentation she helped students in a musical theater class put together for a K-12 Online Conference. The German students created their own art museums, with introductions written and scripted entirely in German. World History II students also created interactive museums of artifacts of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Reformation using a variety of tools that included Glogster, NoodleTools, Animoto, Wikispaces and VoiceThread. “Sometimes even after the class was over, they just wouldn’t leave,” she said, laughing.

The whole time I’m there, a student, who introduces herself as Maya, is working quietly at a computer in the back of Valenza’s office, wearing headphones. She takes them off to explain her project: a stop-motion animation about the future of libraries. Characters—an old man and an ‘80s fairy—were drawn, cut out and moved around a background, and then photographed hundreds of times. I ask how she gets the characters to stay in place for each new scene. Without a trace of condescension in her voice, she answers, “They’re aerial photographs.” Of course, I think. After she leaves, I ask Valenza what class Maya is making the animation for. I’m not surprised to hear that it isn’t for credit at all; it will be used in advocacy efforts supporting school library information programs for students that don't have them. Maya and a few other students volunteered their study hall time to create a PSA that will be used by the Spokane Moms and others.

Toward the end of my visit, I run into the school principal, Mr. Hackney, who tells me about his first trip to the library. He remembers walking in and hearing lots of chatter and noise, so he started “shushing” people. “Everyone started looking at me funny,” he said. “Now I understand. It’s a working library.”

Beyond Jackie & Rosa: Helping Students Find Unfamiliar People to Write About for Black History Month

Recently, my daughter’s Global Studies Class was asked to write a biography about a famous woman from Asia, Africa or South America. The teacher said that in the prior school year, 90 percent of the students chose Mother Teresa. The teacher promised bonus points for anyone who chose an unfamiliar woman. 

Together we reviewed our “Happy Birthday” feature and found 11 women from these three continents. A week later, Maggie claimed her bonus points, and indeed knocked the teacher’s socks off, by turning in a well-sourced paper on  Wangari Muta Maathai, the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The experience gave rise to SweetSearch Biographies.  

Maggie's assignment reminded me that students are often asked to write a biography about a significant person from a particular profession, gender or race/national origin. We knew we had hundreds of biographical profiles in our Happy Birthday, On This Day and features sections, and that to make them easily accessible, we had to put them all in one place and allow students to sort them.

SweetSearch Biographies launched last week, and offers well-sourced profiles, or the SweetSearch results page, for more than 1,000 significant people, and can be filtered by profession, gender and race/national origin. One elated school librarian cheered the timing, at the beginning of Black History Month, as she was "a little weary of Jackie and Rosa who are of course important but sometimes you need to stretch a bit to someone unfamiliar." Given the 80+ profiles of African-Americans, students should be able to knock their teachers’ socks off by finding someone unfamiliar. 

(Note: One state's student assessment division recently asked to license our biographies for the state's elementary school ELA exams. They gushed that our bios were so well written - organized, concise and full of information. So not only do our biographies served as examples of good Web research and writing, but reading them also prepares students for assessment exams!)

(We are updating all of the content from findingDulcinea and republishing it on SweetSearch2Day, its eventual successor).

Here are links to five people whose life stories amazed me when I first read about them on our Website:
 

Elizabeth Blackwell

Thor Heyerdahl

Miriam Makeba

Rita Moreno

Witold Pilecki

 

Thank you for reading,

Mark Moran

Forget the Textbook; Will the iPad and Kindle DX Help Lighten Students' Backpacks?

With the recent unveiling of Apple's iPad, which looks like an oversized iPhone, some publications have begun to speculate that the new touch screen, keyboard-free netbook will also double as a textbook.

The reason for the speculation is that the iPad will feature an iBookstore along with its iBooks application, which will allow users to download and then read books on their device. If that sounds like something you've already heard of, you're right. The new app could make the iPad a competitor to Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader.

And bringing a digital device into the classroom is nothing new, either. Last year, Amazon began attempts to integrate the Kindle DX, a larger version of the original Kindle, into the classroom. It gave away a couple hundred of the electronic readers to college students, with mixed results.

According to an article by Jessica Mintz of the Associated Press, while students liked that the Kindle DX allowed them to access a number of textbooks in one device, some students missed the old-fashioned method of notetaking and dog earing books. Professors found it hard to direct students to the proper page numbers in textbooks because the Kindle DX doesn't number pages, and students can choose the size of the text on each page, potentially creating a different number of pages.

Will Apple's iPad be able to overcome some of the Kindle DX's hurdles in gaining wider use in schools? And will readers prefer the iPad screen for reading compared with the Kindle's screen, which was designed to be easy on the eyes? That remains to be seen. For now, some of the major publishers have already started working on developing iPad applications for study help, but no official word on the actual texts being converted for the iBookstore. 

With the cost of the iPad and the Kindle DX both inching toward $500, even if the texts are cheaper than the hard copies, it is hard to say whether students and parents will want to invest in the products. Many students already have MP3 players and schools have invested heavily in netbooks and computers. Is the technology compelling enough for them to spend more money to get the devices?

Haley Lovett

Audience Development

School Libraries Cut Databases; Effective Web Research Skills Will Become Paramount

Recent cuts in state school spending are causing school libraries to reduce the availability of expensive databases of journals and periodicals. While this will surely result in making it more difficult for students to complete research assignments, it may also force them to improve their ability to use the Internet effectively.

As Joyce Valenza explains in a recent post for School Library Journal, Pennsylvania has cut its subscription with EBSCO, which hosts electronic databases of publications and journals. EBSCO content has long been a “critical tool” for schools and public libraries throughout Pennsylvania, according to Valenza, who wonders how she’ll “cover the gaps” without additional funding.

Echoing Valenza’s concerns is Kristin Hokanson, a technology integration specialist for Pennsylvania’s Upper Merion School District. State funding for Pennsylvania public libraries in 2010 will be $68 million, compared to $94 million in 2008, while a “specific portion of state funding” for databases like Power Library fell from $11 million in 2009 to $2.9 million in 2010. Hokanson discussed funding cuts, which she suggests “undermines years of effort to connect all schools to the Internet,” with Rick Wills of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “Much of the good and reliable information on the Web is not available for free. The free Web is so cluttered that you can't find things,” Hokanson said.

That the 2011 federal education budget proposal doesn’t include “any additional funding for school libraries” is another dilemma librarians face this year, according to Buffy J. Hamilton, the Unquiet Librarian. Hamilton is a media specialist/teacher-librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia, who recently blogged about the budget proposal in the form of a letter to President Obama. Instruction of skills like information evaluation and self-filtering “has the most value when taught in the context of the school curriculum and when driven by student’s own inquiry,” Hamilton writes. Thus, cutting funding for school libraries could be catastrophic for students. 


Glenn Miller, the Pennsylvania Library Association’s executive director, summed up what seems to be causing a sense of panic among educators and librarians. “We are talking about dozens of sources of reliable information, vital educational tools that reach tens of thousands of students with little money,” he said, according to Wills.

The challenge then becomes finding free, online resources that are reliable and educational, and that can provide teachers and librarians with an alternative to the expensive databases of years past.

At Dulcinea Media, we’re repositioning our entire company to be one of these alternatives.  The most loyal visitors to our Web sites are librarians, teachers and students in high school and middle school. Thus, a year ago we began to focus our content on these groups.  We presented at two national conferences in the fall and we learned there is a critical need in the school market for free products that promote the effective, safe and responsible use of the Internet, and that ours fit the bill well. Indeed, in a subsequent post, Valenza reviewed our newest product, SweetSearch Biographies, and noted that it “looks especially sweet in these tight database times.” 

It may not be easy for students and educators to transition away from tried-and-true databases, but when students leave the confines of the classroom, they’ll be better equipped to tangle with the mass of information on the Web.

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 (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 send feedback on SweetSearch4Me to [email protected] so we can fully launch it with your input in September.

We search for more sites to include in SweetSearch by trolling 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. 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. As 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."

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? 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, so 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 [email protected].

Mark Moran
Founder and CEO