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SweetSearch (http://www.sweetsearch.com/), A Search Engine for Students, is a free custom search engine that searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by our team of Web research experts. It excludes unreliable sites that often rank high in other search engines and waste students' time. With only credible results to evaluate, students can focus their energy on determining which results are most relevant to their research. Here are but two examples where SweetSearch's results are far superior to those of Google or Bing: "Shakespeare" http://bit.ly/7Reg7p vs. http://bit.ly/6lUphg vs. http://bit.ly/6ycRcZ "War of 1812" http://bit.ly/87HMYn vs. http://bit.ly/57hoOO vs. http://bit.ly/5L7xiz It's not just that we exclude obvious spam sites; we also usually exclude marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor, and thus are not citable. As importantly, many of the best academic resources on the Web, such as university or other .edu web sites, make little effort to optimize their search rankings and thus often don't appear till the 3rd or 4th page of Google results. Because SweetSearch searches a smaller, more qualified pool of sites, these academic sites often appear on the 1st page of SweetSearch results. And to most students, the 1st page is the only one that exists. To place a SweetSearch search box on your own Web site, copy the code for our widget onto your site: http://www.sweetsearch.com/widget.html

"SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students. It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved."

    Every Web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by our research experts.         SweetSearch Web Research Tutorial Teaches Web Research Skills to Educators and Students.  SweetSearch4Me is our search engine for emerging learners.      

Principles for Evaluating WebsitesBy Stephen Downes How do you know whether something you read on the web is true? You can't know, at least, not for sure. This makes it important to read carefully and to evaluate what you read. This guide will tell you how.

"The Kentucky Virtual Library presents: How to do research! Step 1: Plan your project Plan your project tutorial Define your subject Brainstorm What do you already know? Group similar ideas Identify key words and phrases Make a quest strategy Gather your tools Step 2: Search for information Search for information tutorial The Kentucky Virtual Library The library catalog Encyclopedia Reference books: table of contents and index Magazines and newspaper articles Dictionary Search the World Wide Web What if you can't find anything? Step 3: Take Notes Take notes tutorial The KWL method Fact finder method Data sheets Clustering method (also called mapping or webbing) Venn diagram method Note cards Prints and photocopies Bibliography page Step 4: Use the information Use the information tutorial Scan the page first The five finger test Is the information true or bogus? Put it in your own words Organize the information Compare and contrast Put the information in order Add your own conclusions Step 5: Report Share what you've learned tutorial Step 6: Evaluate Ask yourself, "How did I do?" Glossary Back to the introduction page Portal | Home Base (Site Map) | Plan | Search | The Web | Take Notes | Use | Report | Glossary Teacher's Toolbox | Flash Version | Text Only Version Kentucky Virtual Library"

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea's 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated and deemed reliable by our...

SweetSearch Biographies offers profiles and outstanding search results for thousands of famous-or infamous-people from many walks of life, professions and countries, spanning many centuries. Our nifty filters help you choose the intriguing people you want to learn more about. Looking for female African American authors, for example? Choose Women from the categories on the left, then select African American and Author as your filters. The names in bold link to profiles on our sister site, findingDulcinea. The rest link to the search results for that person on SweetSearch, a Search Engine for Students, which searches only 35,000 Web sites that have been evaluated and approved by our research experts.

Opportunity for teachers to become involved in a global collaborative project by being a judge. Definitely a best practice to review.

This fascinating project needs judges (oh and horizon still does too!) -- hat tip to David Warlick for this link. The student web site entries are due in tomorrow (April 2) for the 2008 competition, and ThinkQuest needs people to judge these entries. To be a judge, you must be employed as a teacher or have a minimum of five years experience in the field of education; be proficient in the English language; and be able to, and have the time to evaluate and score websites based on the provided criteria.

To help students understand the limits of Wikipedia's reliability and credibility, we present these 10 reasons you cannot completely trust information in Wikipedia: