After a week away, I'm happy to say we're back!
This week doesn't have much of a theme. Instead, its a bit of this and that all tossed together. So today, we're learning about Custom Search Engines.
Search Engines have been around for a very long time. Sites like Yahoo, Alta Vista, and Webcrawler were how you got around the internet back in the day! But times change, and so does the internet. Its gotten much bigger, much more popular, and thus... much harder to search. Whereas before, a search for Pirates would get you a few Geocities sites, a historical accounting of the life of Blackbeard, and a website or two offering up downloads of Windows for Workgroups and the latest Kings Quest game, now you get 59 million hits! And thats with Safe Search keeping all the porn out of your search results!
Thankfully, with age and growth comes refinement. In this case, in the form of Customizable Search engines. For mine, I went with Google Co-op, both because I like Google's layout, and because the boys from California can do no wrong, in my opinion. So, I was done with step one: pick a custom search engine... uh, engine. Now for the hard part: What the heck do I want to search?!
Actually, it only took me a few minutes before it became pretty obvious. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I read lots of gaming and tech websites. I like to keep up-to-date on the latest gadgetry to make my water faucet change colors or hold on to things without an extra hand. So I set up a search engine for searching gaming and gadget websites!
Introducing Games & Gizmos!
I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well I can search several websites at once for information on a particular product or concept, instead of having to use the search tools for each individual site (which, often times, are pretty terrible). I can easily see how useful this would be for libraries. Setting up several topic-specific search engines, it would enable both patrons and staff alike to search for information on topics of interest within some general criteria, instead of being innundated with results from all over the web! Limit searches by material-type, like Newspaper archieves or Geneology sites. For an individual, I'm not sure the trouble of setting up these Custom Searches are worth the results, but for a large user-base like a library system, Custom Search engines could spell the difference between an overly complicated website and a user-friendly one.
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