I do it.
My students do it.
We all do it.
We GOOGLE IT!
The easiest thing these days is to find an answer.
But is the answer always the best answer?
How many of you have gone beyond the first, second or third page in search results in Google?
How many have used tools like:
- Google Scholar (for articles, legal opinions and journals)
- Google Books (find whole books, partial excerpts, etc)
- Google Finance (find stock quotes)
- XE.com (for exchange rates of currencies and precious metals)
- Survey Monkey | Survey Gizmo (for creating your own surveys)
- ERIC (digital library of education literature)
- OEDB.org (free online classes)
- TeacherTube.com
- IMDB.com (International Movie Database)
- Youtube.com (many free online tutorials | courses these days)
- the library
- an expert
- Google WonderWheel (as seen above) Wonder wheel How-to.pdf [Presently, Google Wonder Wheel seems to no longer exist. I hope the people at Google bring this option back. For now, check out Google Image Swirl, another similar product, only for images]
This is not an exhaustive list of tools-beyond-Google, but it is a list I presently use as part of criterion for my students to gather information in preparation for a project. I recommend you, as an educator, employ these techniques and others as well. Google is great, but it doesn’t always have the best answer.
For a great interactive graphic that demonstrates: Google Tools to support Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy
education | technology | design 
Dave Curran
March 30, 2011 at 8:25 am
Excellent stuff Tom!
It’s great to have all this stuff in one place. As regards to your Google searching alternatives, you may find some of these additions useful:
http://www.dogpile.com – META Search engine which scours Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask for duplicate results
http://www.yippy.com (formerly Clusty) – as above but also breaks results down into sub-categories (Clouds) on the left.
http://www.polymeta.com – As above but includes a ‘Topics Graph’ for mind-map style visualization of search results
http://demo.carrot2.org – As above but with a slinky wheel ‘Visualization’ tool for searching through subcategories. Results can be categorized by URL (.com, .org, .ac, .net, YouTube etc) or by Source (Google, Yahoo, Bing, ASK, Wikipedia etc).
http://www.iseek.com – Using the ‘Education’ tab on iSeek will return only results from websites, online journals, books etc. that have been specifically designed for, or recognized as, educational tools. Using the folder tree on the left, you can search within results for particular subject topics, lesson plans, presentations and within different grade levels also.
Regards,
Dave.
nine
April 3, 2011 at 8:26 am
I just know that their are alot of app for the ipad and it also can link with iphone what a great tecchnology.
Mimi
April 4, 2011 at 8:27 am
Really helpful article, I have always wondered if there are other tools to research other than google. To me google and wikipedia are the same thing, you can change anything on wikipedia and you can also post anything on online and it will automatically appear on google once you search it. Therefore, if I post something fake or absurd like “Barack Obama was born in Beijing!”, people with no knowledge on the world outside of their own town would think that something like that is real. So once again, thank you for this useful article!
Ning
May 2, 2011 at 7:45 am
I’m one of the people who love to search. I always search everyday as i always want to learn something different or want to know something more. However, I never know that there’re are other tools to research other than google. Thank you, i learned a lot.
ictdesign
May 2, 2011 at 12:31 pm
I am going to write an entry about a couple more ways to search coming up soon. Glad you like searching.