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General Websites Around the Corner: MGuhlin What's New at Scholastic NCS - Tech

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Searching Tips The [|video] does a great job explaining and it will work nicely in instruction with both students and teachers.

These new search options offer us yet another way to demonstrate thinking about searching through refining, filtering, and mining results.

I test drove the panel's feature on an //information literacy// search.

Click on //show options// and the panel appears.



The //Wonder Wheel// is kinda wonderful as a concept mapping visual strategy for exploring related topics.



The //Timeline// feature allows users to visually select a time frame for their results and examine the chronological concentrations of documents relating to the search.



Click on //Related Searches// to display a list of suggested search terms. In this case, I was led to content from AASL and ACRL. Sadly, it was not smart enough to discern information fluency as a relevant alternative term. This feature, combined with the //Wonder Wheel,// will however offer useful supports for learners who have not yet developed the vocabulary or context needed for sophisticated searching.



The results pictured below for Hurrican Katrina, in related search and timeline formats, reveal how useful these new tools might be for learners in examining the timeline of a story and in exploring such related terms as contemporaneous other hurricanes.





The search panel also allows users to see all results or to conveniently filter for [|videos] or [|forums] or [|reviews].

Users may opt to display images from documents on the display list or choose to see a greater amount of text. (I believe this added text is called //rich snippets//.)



[|Google Squared], designed to present research in organized columns and rows, will launch next week.

Just a couple of weeks back [|I posted a little ode to] [|Google News Timeline]. My kids are hooked and I look forward to sharing the new features this week.

What's the philosophy here? Google is trying to meet the user where he or she lives. Danny Sullivan, who [|live blogged yesterday's] [|Searchology] press event, shared this from Google presenter, Udi:

//The real goal should always be to solve the user’s problem.//

//If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If they don’t know how to form the syntax, it’s our problem. If there’s not enough content, it’s our problem.//

In other search news, the much-anticipated [|WolframAlpha Computational Knowledge Agent] is due to launch any minute now.