“Enterprise” Searching with OmniFind
Posted June 12, 2007 · by Melissa T. · in tools
I search the web for information but for me that’s only half of it. I want to find the stuff from the sites I like… Edutopia, ERIC, Annenberg’s learner.org, and LEARN, of course… and so I either use the Google advanced search and limit my search to each site… one at a time, OR I can use OmniFind. I first read about this in an American Libraries article about enterprise searching. The focus of this article was more “how can we find our emails and documents on the intranet” and I suppose that is a desirable outcome as well, but for me it is more about searching my favorite education sites.
So when Walbert asks “How do 8th graders understand history?” I want to find some articles and resources to help me to answer this question. Using OmniFind I search the collection of resources the program’s web crawler has found… and I get America’s History in the Making which looks like a teacher’s guide to teaching history. Sure enough, the first part of this “… six-hour workshop focuses first on the Historical Thinking Skills developed by the National Center for History in the Schools.”
OmniFind, like Google Desktop, probably can be set to crawl my hard drive and who knows where they store the info that is scanned… so those of you (db) who are anxious about privacy might want to look into that more closely. I guess it depends upon what you have on your computer… as State employees our documents are public records so I am careful to keep personal stuff separate. I think the tool has potential so I’m taking my chances!
