19 March 2007

Build Your Own (Google) Search Engine

I’ve had fun putting together 40 teen and children’s book sites to search at once for reviews and author information. My search engine is called Book Review Finder and I have also embedded it on Book Bites. It is open to volunteer contributors if you have sites you think could be added.

The possibilities for using search engine building in "guided research interventions" (to borrow some terminology from Ross Todd – more on that for another post) with students are many. What about having the kids select the sites and then questioning search results to understand how a search engine works?

To experiment click on "Create your own custom search engine" at the bottom of Book Review Finder.

3 comments:

Judy O'Connell said...

Wow - this is great Marita! Can't wait to show this around. Thanks for sharing this with us.

Anonymous said...

How brilliant Marita, especially making it so others can contribute. You may be interested in adding the following link http://amlib.eddept.wa.edu.au/ which is part of Fiction Focus developed by the Department of Education and Training. I have been a regular contributor to the magazine for several years now and their website has fantastic links to all sorts of useful things regarding books for teenagers. The website is found at http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/publications/pub2.htm.

Marita Thomson said...

A great addition, Beth. I review for Fiction Focus also but hadn't thought to add it. It is also a high value addition to the search engine because it is a site which is well established and thus indexed by Google, so it shows up in searches. I noticed that items I know are on my own site don't necessarily come up in search results. I have submitted Book Bites to Google, but this may or may not result in it being indexed any time soon. Apparently another way to get your site indexed is to have it linked from a higher profile site. All this I learned (mostly from my teenage son) as a result of building Book Review Finder.