Searching on Delicious...

            I set up a Delicious account two years ago for my 2^nd TL course through UBC. I was right away impressed with being able to save my bookmarks in a cloud. I have used Delicious many times when teaching in the library. It is easy to pull up my Delicious account and access websites and Youtube videos that I want to show my students. The funny thing is, I have never once searched on Delicious to find websites related to a topic that I am teaching or interested in. This week is the first time that I have tried that feature.  I decided to use the same topic that I chose for my mini digital library for this course. I found many of the same websites that I had come across when doing research for this library. But, the number of actual hits I got when I typed in “Ancient Egypt” was 3266.  I included the quotation marks to narrow down my search. Without the quotation marks the number of hits was 4720!

            This is the list of related tags that showed up: tags that other Delicious users have come up with on their own. 

 

In this environment, I don’t think that it is a real problem not having a consistent, controlled environment. The results retrieved for “Ancient Egypt” on the Delicious site are already much pared down from the results that would have resulted from a Google search. I did not expect to be presented with a short list of excellent web resources, so what I saw was a bonus. However, in a library situation, I would expect to find all of the available resources show up in my search for “Ancient Egypt” as I know that close attention should be paid to subject headings when cataloguing resources. And, I would expect these resources to be good resources since they were chosen by the teacher-librarian.

            I will continue to use Delicious to store my bookmarks to allow me easy access to them, wherever I am. However, I don’t know that I will conduct many searches on this social bookmarking site for topics of interest for research projects with my students. I much prefer specialized search engines such as DMOZ or Sweetsearch where I know that a website has been evaluated following certain criteria and will only show up in searches if deemed a quality website.

Searching, searching, searching...

This week we were to look at how Google, Yahoo and DMOZ, or The Open Directory, three different search engines, determine relevancy rankings. The best thing that I got out of this exercise was the discovery of DMOZ. When I saw the name, Open Directory, it rang a bell, but I had never tried it. I was pleasantly surprised when the search words that I entered for each search engine turned up the best results in DMOZ.

"Ancient +Egypt +grade +7 +resources" yielded 20 educational sites in DMOZ, and in Google and Yahoo my search yielded mainly irrelevant results.  Because I used Boolean logic (adding "+") to narrow down my results, the number of websites was considerably lower than if I had simply typed in a question or a key phrase with none of the following symbols: +, -, "". 

In the discussion forum this week many of my classmates shared their frustration with the Metadata articles, but they also shared some kid-friendly search engines such as: Kids' Search Tools, Kids Click. I would also like to share SweetSearch as a student-friendly search engine. Joyce Valenza says this about Finding Dulcinea, which operates SweetSearch: "What does FindingDulcinea do right? It organizes. It evaluates. It creates context. It is conscious of design. It gets media."  

Try out your next query on SweetSearch and let me know what you think! 

If you are in a French Immersion school/library and are looking for a good French language search engine, try out La Toile du Québec. I've gotten good results for my searches with this search engine.