EVALUATING SEARCH ENGINES FOR AND WITH K-12 STUDENTS

COMPARING SEARCH ENGINES

In stage 2 of the Big6 Skills, Information Seeking Strategies, the emphasis is on the importance of evaluating sources of information and comparing different sources to assess the accuracy of information retrieved.

2. Information Seeking Strategies
2.1 Determine all possible sources
2.2 Select the best sources

* Locating information on the Web is an art rather than a science. Search engines change rapidly, so what worked today may not work tomorrow. Different search engines are different -- they are programmed to identify keywords in the page titles, site titles, and/or all the text. They compile their results into a database, which is what you as the user actually search. The frequency with which they update their sites may differ, and the order in which they present results may also differ. Some search engines rank sites based on “popularity” while others estimate the relevance to your search.

One easy way to convince your students of this fact is to have them search for the same compound topic (more than one word) in several different search engines and compare the number of sites the search engine retrieves. The results will be significantly different. Then ask them to look at how many sites in the first couple of pages of results are really relevant to their search.

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SEARCH ENGINES FEATURED
While there are dozens of search engines that promote themselves as being educational and even more designed just for kids, the search tools selected for the comparison section of this project had to meet the same basic criteria:

• The search engine must be freely available (no subscription or registration required)
• The search engine either promotes itself as a product for students (with an intended audience of at least 2 of the following grade ranges: primary, elementary, middle school, high school) or as a search engine for kids
• The sites listed in the search engine (the database) must include resources for all core subject areas: math, science, language arts and social studies
• The majority of the database must be resources from the Internet at-large as opposed to resources from only one source (i.e. ThinkQuest Library)
• The database must have a minimum of 5000 records.

* Source: Murray, Janet. "Use Location & Access Strategies to Achieve Standards." [Online] 27 July 2004. <http://www.big6.com/showarticle.php?id=430>.