Instructify

A picture is worth a thousand words, and several minutes, too. When it comes to Web searching, we’re stuck trying to figure out if a site is worthwhile by reading a few lines of text on Google’s results pages. Usually, you can tell at first glance whether the page you’ve landed on is what you’re looking for. So why do we waste our time reading text-based descriptions of a site and not just cut to a picture of the site itself?

That’s why RedZee designed its search engine to give you visual results instead of words, letting you find what you need in a hurry without having to read through what you don’t. Type in your search terms and RedZee gives you snapshots of the results. The pics are arranged on a “wheel” that you can quickly scroll through, letting you identify what you want by sight, rather than the traditional process of read, click, hope.

RedZee is also kid-friendly, and not just by virtue of its adorable red zebra mascot. RedZee filters out porn and other inappropriate content, so you don’t need to worry that Little Johnny will “accidentally” stumble across something he shouldn’t be looking at on a school computer.

I like Google just fine, especially their super-handy apps like Google Docs, Google Maps…I could go on all day. But it’s nice to see a new idea in the Web search game, and searching by sight is both fun and fast. You can cover a lot more ground in your searches, so to speak, with visual results. At RedZee, a picture is worth a thousand words you don’t have to scan to find what you’re searching for.-BILL FERRIS

RedZee

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Be a Smooth (Boolean) Operator with Boolify
Find Some Answers at Ask for Kids
Quintura for Kids Simplifies Searching… If You Can Spell “Quintura” to Get There

When I was a kid, search engines like we know them today were nonexistent, and I would sift through Yahoo!’s web directory just like the rest of the mid-90’s nerds out there. These days, kids have vast quantities of information on every topic you can think of right at their fingertips — well, as long as they know how to effectively search for it.

The Boolify Project is a piece of software that takes the concept of Boolean Operators — add “and” to narrow, “or” to broaden, etc. — and boils it down into a visual search engine that’s easy for kids (elementary to middle school level) to understand. By illustrating the logic of their search through puzzle pieces, your students can piece together their searches and see how each change to their search terms changes their results.

And the best part? The search results are presented through Google’s “Safe Search Strict” technology, so your students will get great search results and you don’t have to worry about them stumbling upon something that’s not so safe for the classroom.

Boolify also offers some basic lesson plans to help you understand Boolean Operators and effectively teach them to your students, as well as how to evaluate the credibility of a website. With these tools, you can not only help your students find information on the web, but also determine if it is actually valuable — a skill that proves more and more useful as the web expands.

Check out their instructional video on YouTube. Right now, it’s in beta and only offered in English, but their website indicates that they’re working to make it a multilingual tool.

Come to think of it, I think I know some grown-ups that could really benefit from Boolify… — LAUREN FROHNE

Boolify

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Add Muscle to Your Searches with SortFix

Jeeves has retired while I wasn’t looking. The distinguished butler who used to field questions via the search engine “Ask Jeeves” has moved on to bigger and better things, leaving behind a search engine without a mascot, a domain now just called Ask.com.

Ask for Kids is Ask.com’s search engine for the elementary set. Like its adult counterpart, Ask for Kids allows users to type in their queries using natural language – e.g., “Where does copper come from?” But unlike adult search engines, Ask for Kids will not return a list that includes information about joining a copper trade group, or the home page of an exotic dancer whose name is Copper.

In fact, the websites returned have been green-lighted by human editors who look for age-appropriate content of educational value. A search for “What is a presidential primary?” returned a concise summary explaining U.S. presidential primaries in three sentences, as well as links to 2008 primary and caucus results, an article about delegate math, and an election glossary.

The stack of virtual books on the side of the page includes a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, and biographical dictionary – an excellent feature that slyly teaches kids how to use traditional reference sources, just in case one of them accidentally wanders into a library sometime. Other “books” cover core subject areas like math, history, science, and geography, and the page also features a link to news resources. It’s an easy go-to site for the next time you send a student to look something up.

And don’t worry about Jeeves. Apparently he’s befriended some monkeys. (I’m not kidding.) -EMILY JACK

Ask for Kids

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Quintura for Kids Simplifies Searching… If You Can Spell “Quintura” to Get There
Add Muscle to Your Searches with SortFix

Here’s a handy tool to help you visually refine your search terms. Running a search through SortFix lets you manipulate your search terms more easily.

I’ve never quite gotten a handle on all the quotation marks, minus signs, and other search operators. Pity, because they can really help you sift through useless results that Google and Yahoo! sometimes turn up. SortFix takes the headaches away by letting you drag and drop common results into “Add to Search” for stuff you want, and “Remove” for pages you want to skip. As of right now, it only searches Google and Yahoo!, but hopefully more search engines are on the way. But even with just those two engines, SortFix can help you find what you need a lot faster. -BILL FERRIS

You’re probably thrilled to have the entire Internet to browse—where else would you find so many places to play Texas Hold ‘Em? But for a nine-year-old, that’s an awful lot of information to sift through. Quintura for Kids is a pretty limited search engine that uses a tag cloud to let young browsers refine their results. Start with one of their suggested searches, or type your own, and you’ll see new tags appear.

Quintura for Kids knows what kids are looking for—the site includes icons for six of the most common searches: around the world, computers and games, music, TV, movies, and sports. Those categories don’t sound like an educator’s dream, but Quintura for Kids did a decent job of pointing kids toward sites that could be useful in a classroom. Results are drawn from the Yahoo! Kids engine, so you can be pretty confident that they’re kid safe—and not Texas Hold ‘Em sites.

In fact, my only real complaint about Quintura for Kids was the name of the site. You’d better bookmark it now, because the benefits of easy searching are pretty limited if you can’t spell “quintura” and get to the site in the first place. -ROSS WHITE

Quintura for Kids