Quintura Search Engine

This has been around a while and a few people have recommended  Quintura to me, I have not actually used it until this week. I was looking for a new search engine that used clusters or the tag cloud concept.

I tried a search on the Middle ages. This is the main era for study for the year 8 history classes. The students can chose an aspect from that era on which they must do some in depth study. Some know exactly what they want to work on and others are less sure. I have spent a lesson with the classes working on refining their searches to achieve the best results.

I also try to encourage the students to define the means and applications by which they are able to employ their sifting and refining strategies. There are many and ever expanding number of ways in which they can explore the digital universe. Many like the visual searches.

iBoogie and Mooter have been used in the past to show clustering and they offered some visual leads to information but Mooter no longer mets our requirements. Many students need help in refining searches or thinking through topics so this is where Quintura can be used. It is a visual search that uses word association to refine search results.

Like iBoogie, Quintura splits the screen with the traditional (google-like) information on the right and a tag cloud on the left.

If the mouse hovers over any word in the cloud search added related terms appear. If you hover for a legth of time or ”click” on the term, it is added to the search bar at the top and a new tag cloud appears.  

Hovered over "middle ages" and it appeared as a phrase in the seaarch bar

 

This picked up the hundred years war. I like the fact that there are not too many tags on the screen at the one time, so it is less confusing.

Another bonus is that the the query results are very easy to share using email. This can be sent to a teacher as the student is working on his research, allowing the teacher to better understand the some of the searching stategies of the student. It would also be good for group work, where each member of the group might take  a different aspect of the same topic.

The tabbed options at the top also make it very easy to switch to image or video searching without changing the query.

Middle ages - Image search

A different option is that you can easily convert any query results page into embeddable code for display on another web page.

The search results for Quinturawere quite good accuracy wise and it is viually easy to read/use. The searching was a bit like a journey of discovery at times. It was fine but, for myself, I really like to narrow things down right at the beginning of the search and, at times, it seemed to be a little bit slower at searching than some of the other search engines. Students did not find this a major quibble (just me!). Another search engine that is worth informing students about

For the younger researchers, there is also a Quintura for kids with an explanatory video.

It offers similar options to Quintura but you have a short results page with icons and large text. Results here seemed to be accurate, informative and more importantly, age-appropriate.

2008: my top 10 tools/sites

Uploaded to Flickr 21092008 by mugley

I closed the library doors for the last time last Friday evening. This is my last job to do on line for 2008. I was thinking about my top 10 whilst I was cleaning out a room where we have been storing our display materials. We have been given some new cupboards to replace the storage place we lost just on 12 months ago. Hands-on is sometimes therapeutic and necessary in the library. I took about 850 fiction books off the shelves a week or so ago. The books were old copies, and no longer read, and would have been picked up by our computer system but the well-loved but tatty copies need to be looked at. We need to work out what needs to be replaced from this group and some are part of series, so if they can’t be replaced, the whole series may as well go. I have been able to find good replacement series titles in local second-hand shops.

Anyway back to to top 10:

1. SearchMe:  I introduced this to students earlier this year, along with a few others of a similar ilk. Both senior and junior students really took to SearchMe very quickly.  SearchMe is a search engine that allows you to view the web pages your search has turned up before opening them. The other really significant aspect is their “Stacks.” Students liked the click and drag options to store information they have found and the ability to share it with others. I wrote 2 posts about using it, in early July and a few days later. These have been the most viewed posts and although there have been few comments I believe that this search engine has proved popular.

2. Diigo (and Delicious): The social book marking tools have become very important to me. I wrote about Diigo, and why I like using it, in detail in an earlier post. I have really found the group sharing a great boon to me.

3. Flickr (and the tools for searching and using the images.) This has been a great source for finding CC images and using them in a variety of different and interesting ways. I am greatly indebted to those clever folk who create these tools and share their work with the rest of us. You could do a top 10 Flickr tools! Search tools such as FlickrStorm, FlickrLeech,  CompFight and FlickrCC make it so easy to find images as does TagGalaxy.  The photo sets from various people and bodies have also been fantastic sources for digital images. A great source of information for those in schools is the Diigo Group, “Flickr in education.”

4. Life/Google Photo archive.: This is an amazing resource that chronicles life since the 1860′s. I discussed it in a post in November. I have been back to this site quite a number of times since I discovered it.

5. Europa Film Treasures: This is an archive of historical European tools. (My Post on it) Again I love the social history part of this. I studied film many years ago as part of my degree and have always found the medium fascinating.

6. Audacity: the free tool that enabled students to create radio interview podcasts in response to their literature circle class reading. This tool has been used for a number of things but the one I had the most fun listening to were the podcasts our student produced, and their enthusiastic response to the class work.

7. Google has so many products. I guess the next one I like is Google maps. I used this for the first time when I was following the Tour de France. Since then there have been all sorts of projects that have used its capabilities. Diigo has another group that called “Google in Education” that is worth a look.

8. WorldMapper is a wonderful collection of world maps that allows viewers to see various types of information in a graphic way, i.e. as a map

9. Silobreaker: It is a useful search engine tool that you can use to find information about a current news topic. It is a very slick way to aggregate the entire Web’s information on a topic into one page. You also have the option of an advanced search to narrow the search down.

10. WordPress: The blogging platform I use. I know that people are saying the Twitter is the “now” tool and blogging is old hat. I was reading a blog the other week that talked about both. To paraphrase, it said “Twitter is a way of connecting, but blogging is more than just connecting, it is also about reflection. The two are complimentary to each other in the circle of learning.” I believe this to be the case. It does not have to be one or the other. In fact I could not put onto Twitter everything in this post, but I can make others aware of my post and they can decide whether or not to read it and or comment further.

So there it is my top 10 for 2008. There are others that I like and next year it will probably change but all of the above are worth a look.

Searchcube

We seem to be getting new visual search engines all the time. I have had other posts about visual search engines, SearchMe and Viewzi being my favourites, but after seeing a tweet about this new one I thought I would have a look. SearchCube searches for the world wide web for information in websites, images and videos.

I entered my search terms and the results were shown as a 3D style cube and in a very visual and compact way. I searched for  Australian immigrants, volcanoes, Dali and cuneiform.

 

As always it is useful to display visually the sites that Searchcube found. Students can evaluate whether or not a site might be of use to them based on  the text and and images displayed before they go to the site. The Searchcube images were smaller than those found and shown by the other search engines above, but a larger image appears at the side when you hold the cursor over one of the images. At this time you are also given the type of result, eg website, image or video, and the web address and any brief description available.  

Once the search results appear you navigate around the cube by using the arrow keys, the shift key and the mouse. It is easy to use, without anyone really needing the simple searching guide.

This graphical format however does not load up quickly and where would I be likely to use it? It would be interesting to do an analysis of how the images were arranged or to do a comparison with the first page of results for a google search on the same topic. I cannot see in-depth research being done using this search engine, especially as there are no advanced searching options, but perhaps on a different level, looking at symbolism in art or religion. I will probably stick to Searchme and Viewzi, when showing the students some visual search engines, but it might be fun to show them this and then have some discussion about research and information and visual literacies.

For me it was fun to have a look at and it is visually striking (the WOW factor) but not for long term use. The tool also requires the use of Flash, although many browsers have this.

Visual search engines look too “cool”!

Search-Engine-Marketing,
originally uploaded by Danard Vincente.

I have been teaching our students about how to best use search engines and also showing them some alternatives to Google. As homework the boys had to complete some note taking exercises using SearchMe, Viewzi and Cuil.The students loved the visual search engines and even though they were searching and taking notes from the sites they located, they were totally engrossed during the last period for the day. Note taking was not that well received before.

One student completed the work and uploaded it to the appropriate workspace. When the work was checked, the boy had used Google to complete the task. When asked why this was the case, the reply was that his mother had seen SearchMe and told him to “get off that site and use Google!” He tried to explain but she was convinced that he was not right and it was not an appropriate tool for him to be using.

It begs the question, why did she not think that SearchMe was a valid search engine? Did it look like too much fun? Did it just look too different? Has the Google marketing machine really taken over in our collective consciousness?

I am working on an on-line survey, in which I will ask our students to evaluate the search engines we have used this year. Perhaps I will have to extend any survey to the parents of our students as well.

More on students using search engines

Looking up stuff,
originally uploaded by shareski.

I can really use this at home. This is great, let me save it to my favourites. I am going to set this as my main search page. I want to show Dad what you can find when you use this!

These are comments from year 7 students about search engines! Not about some of the other great tools they are also using. Today I have shown yet more students the visual search engines SearchMe and Viewzi and another Year 7 class these search engines as well as using the advanced search option in Google.