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This week our class task was to find and evaluate the results of "wikis education" in three different search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN were off limits for the purpose of this task. So I set out on this little adventure by googling search engines. From there I decided to try the recommended sites: http://www.ask.com/ and http://www.alltheweb.com/. Our job was to compare the top 5 results of our searches and decide which one produced the best. To be honest I really wasn't impressed with either one of these search engines. Of the top 5 results in Ask.com, only four worked and one site "Creating Courses" was actually part of "Pink Flamingos Resource List". The author was pretty secretive about their personal information which made me question the validity of the site. They did state that the validity of information lied within the linked sites and not within their site.

AlltheWeb.com produced 5 different results from Ask.com. Three were educational based, one was for a small consulting agency and the last one was part of a project for NASA. Although I liked the educational sites, the other two weren't quite what I was looking for. By the way I also looked up the key words in http://www.altavista.com/ and I got the same top 5 results as I did in AlltheWeb.com.

So at this point in the task, I was a little frustrated. All of the so called "recommended" sites weren't giving me what I wanted. So I decided to try scholarly search engines. Although I found some good sites for information, it really wasn't presented in the form I wanted. So my last attempt was for a mega search engine. I found a website called http://www.searchenginewatch.com/. It finally gave me hope. They provided a review of some of the metacrawlers and metasearch engines. One of the "award winners" was http://www.kartoo.com/.

Kartoo.com is probably the coolest search engine I've ever seen. Results appear in a mind map design. The mind map categorizes the different types of information, for example "research", "study", "work", "teaching", "links", etc. Pages display about 12 results but they aren't numbered ... and this is what I like. You can just click on a link (presented in the form of an icon) in the area you are looking. When you run your cursor over the links, connections appear between the links. I found some of the same sites on this search engine as did on the others.

Overall, I liked Kartoo.com the best. I also found a site called http://www.surfwax.com/ that provided some good results but in a different manner. It lists the results line by line and provides you the source and highlights any information from 2007. It looked like the findings were pretty good as well.

Try out Kartoo.com. It is really different but great for the visual learner!

Below is a brief website evaluation on one of the sites I found using the Kartoo search engine:
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Title: Encyclopedia of Educational Technology

Website: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/wikis/index.htm

This site is a .edu site (educational) and is produced by SDSU Department of Educational Technology. You can link to the department’s homepage where it states its purpose “to encourage wise use of systems, environments, tools, products, and strategies that can enhance human learning and competence.” This site provides educational resources in the form of an encyclopedia. The main sites are up to date and all appear to work. You can contact the editor directly by email. Information appears to be presented in a balanced, factual way. I felt the site was easy to use but I would have liked to see the publication date of each entry so I knew how current it was.

I liked this site because it gave the basic information about wikis in education and provided links and references to other resources. Furthermore, if I didn’t understand a term, I could look it up in their encyclopedia. I trusted the information more because it came from a educational technology department of a university; however, I realize every site is subjective to a certain degree.

Stefanie