The first search engine that I used was called COLOSSUS and it claims, "Explore 342 countries and territories!
Search in other languages! Submit websites to search engines! Since 1998." COLOSSUS is found at http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/ Oops. I see now that that is just a search engine directory. I guess I will leave it here because it seems useful. That lead me to one of the English language engines in the U.S. called http://search.ezilon.com/ That engine produced no hits!
The next engine is called scrubtheweb.com at http://www.scrubtheweb.com. Scrub the web found 46 hits and it had a reasonable top 5 for my purposes. It had 3 sponsored links, clearly demarcated. One was from http://editme.com. This seems to be a competitor to wikispaces. The non-sponsored links were lead by four blogs, and then the "Online Internet Institute" which seems to be focused on technology education and support of it to teachers. It wasn't the most satisfying mix of materials, but I suppose blogs are the most cutting edge in considering wikis in education. It would be interesting to see what will be available in a few months.
The third one was about.com at http://about.com/
About.com returned the best top 5 set of results (sponsored ones) if I was looking to start a wiki, but only returned 10 overall results that were not sponsored. About.com is an engine that is similar to Yahoo in that it uses categories/subjects to organize the web. Because I had a topic that seems to have fit into the category "Teaching with Technology" I saw several good blog articles and ideas, but nothing that seeded to deal exclusively with teaching using wikis. It is such a new concept that it doesn't surprise me that that is true. Back to the sponsored links. The best one appeared to be http://www.courseforum.com/cf/. They claim: "Smart instructors already know that the better interaction between your students, the better the learning experience for everyone."
Just for the sake of comparison, I have now run the same search on Google, and the results are not even funny. The top 5 for Google are not just blogs but sites that seem to be very much more applicable to educators looking for leads in the field.
I will now evaluate the site courseforum.com/cf/ It is clearly a commercial venture and it has an attractive set of features that make it seem reliable and widely useful. There is an easily identifiable "about us" link that gives a brief history of the company and its efforts. It also has a series of options for contacting the company via email, phone, fax, and mail. What a nice development considering all of the sites that now hide such information in the darkest corner. The copyright date makes it clear that this site has been updated in 2007. The sidebar allows for a downloaded sample of the program that the site is titled after. It offers Linux, Max OSX, and Windows versions, as well as FreeBSD, which I've never heard of! The text is attractively spaced and doesn't seem too dense. In fact, one of the big selling points of this program (oft-repeated) is that it is easy to get started and easy to run. They also offer a "stripped down" free version that could be downloaded and then upgraded to add functions. The side bar also lists nearly 20 intrasite links that by their titles seem to be a comprehensive list of support and informational pages. Those links all worked and seemed relevant to the product. The product is built around discussion tools, announcement boards, etc., so wikis are a side focus for this group/product. If you are looking for a moodle of your own, this company claims they can do it for you (complete with wikis).
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6 comments:
HI there. The colossus websearch directory is pretty useful. I keep this in my favorites list--but don't remember to look there enough! You mentioned Ezilon's not giving you information, but I think you might not have noticed that you need to choose where you want Ezilon to search. If you click "web" for instance (instead of the default "directory", you get some pretty good wiki links. I think this is actually a flaw in Ezilon--because it looks like other web search engines, but offers several other options for searches as well (so do some of the others like Google, but web is usually the default).
Scrub the web is a bit like Dogpile, but chases after Lycos, Overture, Web wombat, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and six or seven others, but NOT Google.
I do like these broad sweepers in that they, as you say, offer a nice variety of choices from which to choose.
Your last statement--that blogs are cutting edge wikis--calls to question some definitions. Are wikis blogs? Are blogs wikis? When are they not each other? Cheers!
I've always been leary of about.com. Not long ago About.com kept stealing my homepage. Eventually it also took over many of the pages I usually go to. I couldn't even get to Yahoo without my computer automatically being redirected to About.com. Before I finally got it fixed, I couldn't even get to my email.
This was a few years ago, and About seems to be a more legitimate search engine now. The whole experience was enough for me to decide never to use About.
Yea, I agree with you Doug. The quality of the Google results had much stronger value. The ones I used all seemed to return a lot of ads for creating a wiki, and a lot of blogs. Not that these are bad, but not what I was looking for. Scrubtheweb is another pretty funny name. I'm surprised I didn't come across that one.
I'm going to give Colossus a try. It is funny to think that we tend to search teh "World Wide Web", but often ignore resources from other countries.
Doug,
I didn't run into Srubtheweb during my search engine search so I gave it a try. I wasn't really all that impressed with the results. They didn't seem specific enough for me. I also tried Colossus. I thought this was really neat just because so many countries are represented. I tried Albania and Spain and then look up something in Spanish on Abacho (one of Spain's search engines). I think this would be really neat for an assignment. Regarding About.com, I really don't like this site because there are so many pop ups; it drives me crazy so I don't use it that often.
Stefanie
I think that the most telling outcome of your search is that you chose a business site. However, in your evaluation you didn't comment on how this could affect the information that you find there.
How reliable do you think that their information is?
In my mind, the fact that it is a purely commercial site means that the information contained therein in high suspect. Their focus is on sales and not necessarily information. And, of course, there is really no information about wikis in education on the site. The product itself seems to be a discussion forum.
Dan
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