Updated Google Internet Searching

In the recent issue of eSchoolNews I read a short article about Google Tunes Up It’s Internet Search Results. On the left of any search results people can find tools for reshuffling and filtering search results into specific categories. According to Google the changes were designed to encourage people to use Google’s search engine more frequently.

So here’s an example – I did a search for “Gulf of Mexico oil spill” and got about 27,000 results. My choices were listed under Everything and Any Time. It was easy to filter the search in Google by the categories and by the time frame posted.  Photos and videos could easily be viewed in threes or all at one time.  This would be a great tool for teachers and students to be able to select the type of media to view information and the time posted to either see the progressive history of a story or to read the most current posting.

To compare I did a search for “Gulf of Mexico oil spill" in Yahoo and I got 143,000,000 results that could be filtered by news source, photos, video or Twitter. The photos could be viewed three at a time using the scroll arrow or viewed by pages.  Last I did the same search in Bing receiving 13,000 results. The results could be filtered by News About, Images Of, Related Searches or Search History.  Bing brought up all images on one page which took some time to load. But the images could be filtered by size, layout, color, style, and people. The one feature I really liked in Bing was the ability to mouse over each video thumbnail to preview the video.

So depending on your needs each search engine offers choices for teachers and students.

To read the article from eSchoolnews go to:

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/eschoolmedia/ecampus_201006/#/50

Image from Google Internet Search