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 17th 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
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