:: web searching ::

During my search I kept running into dead ends and "employment opportunities" using the words "telecommunication, education, etc." so I broadened my search to include "web 2.0" and "ICT" *information Communication Technology*which is more of a popular term for some of the same things that we were looking for.

Part 1:
~e-learning 2.0-- how Web technologies are shaping education.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php


This site is basically an essay written by Steve O'Hear discussing the different web 2.0 communication based technologies and trends that are available. This site specifcally discusses blogs, edu-blogs, podcasting, media sharing, and DOPA and Social Networks. He offers some insight into the usefulness of each of these tools and highlights some example uses for each of them. Overall this was a very informative site.

~ Web 2.0 Teaching Tools

http://hubpages.com/hub/Education20

This page is a collection of different "web 2.0" tools. Some could not be classified as "telecommunications" based but others could. Some that I didn't think about being useful for Education were listed. There are classroom management tools which allowed for educators to be interactive with parents and other stake holders in the education process. There are of course blogs and online meeting tools listed as well.

~ ICT and Education

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATIONs/0,,contentMDK:20264888~menuPK:617610~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:282386,00.html

This is a site which is a part of worldbank.org (I need to spend some more time looking at this entire site because it looks very interesting). I've gathered that the world bank's mission is to help develop "developing countries" and education is one of the areas they are helping. This page is specifically dedicated to informing people about ICT in Education, the projects that World Bank has done, research about ICT in developing countries, events, and news.

~ Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/edtools.html

This is another collection of tools which educators can use for the classroom. This site has both regular educational tools and web 2.0 tools. This is a more detailed list than the other site and includes things like RSS aggrigators, online databases, wikis, video hosting, and "synchronous Collaborative Environments". This is a very well put together site.

~ How Campus Communication Technology Works

http://communication.howstuffworks.com/how-campus-communication-technology-works1.htm

This site was a bit different than the others that I chose to review. This actually discusses how different communication technologies work. It discusses things like Blackboard, interactive whiteboards which are connected to students' laptops at their desks, *very cool* and then discusses other information access. It also discusses third party resources that universities and colleges are using.

Part 2:

I was basically overwhelmed with the sheer number of search engines and I didn't want to use the ones everybody else was going to use so I just went through the list of 100 and randomly picked from those... I generally use Google for my searches out of default simply because it is integrated into all the browsers that I use (especially chrome) :) but I am not against any of these others. The only reason I see to stop using Google though is because they are becoming Skynet :)

I used "Pizza" as my search term and All I have to say is that Pizza Hut needs to give their SEO people a raise because they were the top hit on every search engine that I tried it on.

CometQ

http://www.cometquery.com/ (don't waste your time)

I said above that I am not against any of these others... That statement is not true. I am against using this search engine. It has been around since 2007 but that is all I the information that I could find out about them. The formatting of the search engine was poor and the translation for the fonts was not always complete. The search items were relevant to the term but there was nothing there to help my brain decipher what I was looking at. Overall I'm not impressed. It did have a blog search and a "Creative" search but I couldn't find what I was looking for in the blog search and I'm not sure what the creative one was for. There was no information available to help. I did, however, see an advertisement for Bing. :)

Exalead

http://www.exalead.com/search

Apparently, exalead.com primarily provides and manufactures search based application for major companies. They also have a search engine that searches the web for information, images, videos, wikis, and others (labs, baagz ??, blogs and enterprise). They claim that they are faster... they didn't say than what however. The search results were very cool. Each result had a thumbnail of the page and on the right side they had statistics and page types broken down. It was a very fast search. It also had predictive text when I was typing my search term. Overall a very nice search engine. Lots of customizations and allows for thumbnail type bookmarks on the entry page.

liveplamsa

http://liveplasma.com

This search site is amazing!! It is not a normal search site like you would imagine. This site only searches Bands/artists, movies, directors, and actors. It creates a map (if you will) of your search and how it relates to others that are similar. I typed in Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings and it gave a bubble map of all the different movies that are similar in genre, themes, directors, etc. I will most definitely use this more often. When the user clicks on a selection it tells information, gives a legend, and a link to that movie/music on Amazon for purchase. I'm glad I found this!!!

Surf Wax

http://www.surfwax.com

Surfwax is another search engine that is basically the same as the others. Its layout is much different in that the results are very concise and well organized. It offers a full text list of your search results. It appears that it piggybacks off of other search engines. It is fast but all of my results were the same as the others because it uses (and referenced) MSN and AllTheWeb for its results. Nothing spectacular here but nothing really negative either.

Zula

http://www.zuula.com

Zula is a service that checks multiple search engines at the same time. I typed in "pizza" and it gave me (unaltered) results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Gigablast, Exalead, Alexa, Entireweb, Mahalo, and Mojeek. These were tabs at the top of the page. It looked kind of like a frame for zuula above these search engine's search results. It did not have any of the sidebar features of some of the other search engines but it did list related searches. This is a good service if you need to see the differences between search results.