Oct 07 2009
Create your own custom search engine
When we ask learners do research on the internet, they are sometimes faced with inappropriate search results. This is any firewall administrator’s nightmare as well as a valid concern for most teachers and librarians. A search can also bring up millions of results, some of which are either commercial in nature or irrelevant. By creating a custom search engine we can make sure that learners only search within pre- approved search sites.
To create such a search engine is actually remarkably easy, the hard part is to collect relevant sites to populate your search engine with. I have decided to START with a kid safe search engine and built on it! Here is my search engine and a learning object that I have created to assist you to get going with your own one as well. I would be grateful if you can play with the learning object and let me know if there are any mistakes (grammar/spelling, broken links etc).
Come on try it out! Search for something!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kay Van Danacker. Kay Van Danacker said: My favorite new thing today: RT @maggiev: A teachers guide to creating your own custom search engine http://ow.ly/td5W [...]
Alas, I searched my new search engine for the word “sex” to check that there really won’t be anything “bad”
But Google let me down. All the search results were above board but the google ad was a link to a local site where you can download bad stuff. MMMmmmm. So much for a kid safe search engine. Bad Google.
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