Sweet Search. According to the site: "SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students.
Most search engines search billions of Web sites and return tens of millions of results; some are from reliable Web sites, some are not. SweetSearch searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by a staff of Internet research experts at Dulcinea Media, and its librarian and teacher consultants.
SweetSearch excludes results from the unreliable sites that rank high in other search engines, and waste your time. It lets students choose the most relevant result from a list of credible results, rather than having them waste time on unreliable sites."
It's been put together by Dulcinea Media. Who are they you ask? Again, according to the site it "is the Curator of the Internet. Its mission is to help change the reality that most students cannot effectively conduct research on the Internet." I really do wish people wouldn't say things like that - it's even worse than calling yourself a 'social media guru'. No, you're *not* the Curator of the Internet, and you just sound very infantile trying to pretend anything of the sort. Worse, they have also decided that they're the 'Librarian of the Internet' as well.
Leaving aside the dubious claims Sweet Search works ok, given the limitation of the sites chosen, though I'd guess there's rather more than 35,000 reputable sites. No idea if you can do advanced search - there's no link so I'm presuming not, and they haven't bothered with a help or FAQ section, so we're left guessing as to what is possible. No image search, no news search, no RSS... just straight forward searching of the sites they deem appropriate. To be honest, I think I'd be more inclined to produce more, smaller search engines based on Google's custom search engines. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but equally I can't see much of a reason TO use it, and wouldn't it make more sense to just teach students how to search and evaluate content, instead of using a restrictive engine like this?
Most search engines search billions of Web sites and return tens of millions of results; some are from reliable Web sites, some are not. SweetSearch searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by a staff of Internet research experts at Dulcinea Media, and its librarian and teacher consultants.
SweetSearch excludes results from the unreliable sites that rank high in other search engines, and waste your time. It lets students choose the most relevant result from a list of credible results, rather than having them waste time on unreliable sites."
It's been put together by Dulcinea Media. Who are they you ask? Again, according to the site it "is the Curator of the Internet. Its mission is to help change the reality that most students cannot effectively conduct research on the Internet." I really do wish people wouldn't say things like that - it's even worse than calling yourself a 'social media guru'. No, you're *not* the Curator of the Internet, and you just sound very infantile trying to pretend anything of the sort. Worse, they have also decided that they're the 'Librarian of the Internet' as well.
Leaving aside the dubious claims Sweet Search works ok, given the limitation of the sites chosen, though I'd guess there's rather more than 35,000 reputable sites. No idea if you can do advanced search - there's no link so I'm presuming not, and they haven't bothered with a help or FAQ section, so we're left guessing as to what is possible. No image search, no news search, no RSS... just straight forward searching of the sites they deem appropriate. To be honest, I think I'd be more inclined to produce more, smaller search engines based on Google's custom search engines. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but equally I can't see much of a reason TO use it, and wouldn't it make more sense to just teach students how to search and evaluate content, instead of using a restrictive engine like this?
Phil, thank you for your review and constructive feedback, which we love to hear. To answer many of your suggestions, SweetSearch is a Google custom search engine, so it is subject to the limitations of one - no image search, etc. We are exploring options to add images from other sources, while also considering options other than Google to power it all. And while we are adding to the pool of sites searched every day, in my experience SweetSearch works quite well for academic searches. Yes, students should be taught to search and evaluate content, but the day on which most students can use general search engines effectively is a long way off. Here are but two examples where SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Google or Bing. It's not just that we exclude obvious spam sites that most students could spot; we also usually exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not citable. As importantly, many sources such as university or other .edu web sites, which make little effort on the SEO front and thus often don't appear till the 4th page of Google results, often appear on the 1st page of SweetSearch. And to most students, the 1st page is the only one that exists.
"Shakespeare" http://bit.ly/7Reg7p vs. http://bit.ly/6lUphg vs. http://bit.ly/6ycRcZ
"War of 1812" http://bit.ly/87HMYn vs. http://bit.ly/57hoOO vs. http://bit.ly/5L7xiz
Posted by: Mark Moran, CEO, Dulcinea Media | January 19, 2010 at 11:04 PM
Thinking about this- on the back of pondering Cornell's collaboration with Google on a law engine- it struck me that Dulcinea was Don Quixote's princess. So are they tilting at windmills too? ;)
Posted by: Pete | January 20, 2010 at 08:30 AM
Phil, I am CEO of Dulcinea Media. I sent a comment about this post the other day, and just wanted to be sure you had received it, as it has not posted.
Posted by: Mark Moran, CEO, Dulcinea Media | January 21, 2010 at 03:47 PM