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SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

"This is a visual history of "search" and search engines; hopefully it's both a trip down memory lane and a useful resource for anyone looking to learn a bit more about the history of Internet search engines. If you like the graphic or find it useful you're welcome to embed the image on your own site, link to it, or give it a Digg/Stumble/Etc. "

Lecture webcasts are readily available on the Internet. These include class lectures, research seminars and product demonstrations. Webcasts routinely combine presentation slides with either a synchronized audio stream (i.e., podcast) or an audio/video stream. Conventional web search engines retrieve this content if you include "webcast" or "lecture" among your search terms, or search a website that specifically organizes lecture content. But users, particularly students, want to find the place in a lecture when an instructor covers a specific topic. Answering these queries requires a search engine that can search within the webcast to identify important keywords. TalkMiner aggregates and indexes lecture videos available across the internet. The system processes RSS feeds from a variety of sites to collect lecture videos. The system automatically processes the video to generate metadata describing each talk including the video frames that contain slides, their time offsets, and the text recovered from those frames by optical character recognition. TalkMiner does not maintain a copy of the original videos. When a user plays a lecture, the video is played from the original website on which the lecture video is hosted. As a result, storage requirements for TalkMiner are modest.

"No matter what topic you are interested in, Google can only go so far in providing you with the search results that you need. You have to remember that Google is searching through the entire Internet in order to offer you relevant results about your unique topic. The more unique or specialized the topic, the more difficult it is for Google to identify useful sites." This How To from Make Use Of details how to create a custom search engine based around a pre-defined set of websites.

All search engines are engaged in a constant battle with entities that aim to manipulate search engine results for various reasons. Search Engine Optimization can be a major money earner or a significant distraction depending on what side of the search activity you are on. This infographic explores how Google is attempting to deal with one aspect of SEO, Content Farms.

SearchLion is according to Phil Bradley, "....a fairly straightforward search engine - you can see what it covers from the tabbed bar. It's worth mentioning that you can also add in more search options yourself if you wish. You can choose where it takes its results from - Google, Yahoo/Bing or SearchLion's resources itself. Unfortunately, you don't have that option with the other search tabs, which is a bit of a shame. You can run a search and the results screen looks fairly straightforward - results to the left, adverts to the right. However, you can also choose a multi category, so as well as looking at Web results, you can also choose to view images, news etc. at the same time."

Powered by Google this "instant" search portal searches the Web, images, news, video, Twitter and Google Maps. Though it is slower to react than single focussed searches, because it aggregates results across a range of reference types it is still useful. To find out more check out the video link in the bottom right corner of the search screen.

A google custom search engine that returns results under a range of tabs including lesson plans, printables, practice, videos and games.

"Searching videos on YouTube is simple but if you know a few tricks, it becomes even more fun and accurate. The YouTube team has considerably simplified their video search function making it easier for people to perform advanced searches on YouTube without learning any complicated syntax."

"Searching the app store is clunky. Here at iAppGuide we give you an easy way to search and preview the app store from one screen. We provide you specialized sorting and innovative previews to make finding awesome apps easier!"

Think you know about searching with Google, then take this activity to find out how much you do know and at the same time inform an online research study.

DeweyDigger.com is a visual search portal where you can "Explore knowledge via the Dewey Decimal Classification; just clickety-click."  On the splash page you are presented with the main Dewey Numbers and an ever-changing interactive panorama showing images from these listings.  Next you need to click on an image to access a cloud tag of terms in that call number.  From there you can select a tag and then select a search or research tool to locate information.

This excellent site begins with an overview of the WWW before looking more closely at Search with annotated lists of search tools and techniques as well as an extended discussion on the Deep Web and keeping current.

In today's schools, most research is completed online, and Google is a great resource for combing the web. But at the same time, it's not always easy to find exactly what you want, given that there are usually millions of results - with varying degrees of accuracy. These tricks can help you find the best results, while saving time and making your life easier.

Google has no shortage of services around the web, but those various information resources often seem disconnected. A new Google interface, called WDYL - or "What Do You Love?" - resolves that by bringing together previews of various specialized Google searches in one place.

"The life span of a Google query is less then 1/2 second, and involves quite a few steps before you see the most relevant results. Here's how it all works."

"Computational thinking (CT) involves a set of problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers use to write programs that underlay the computer applications you use such as search, email, and maps. Below is a list of specific techniques along with real world examples from our every day lives. "

Some great programming challenges that can be used to stimulate learning and thinking.

"We are suffering here and there from a cut-and-paste culture bred by the ease with which any of us can locate and save information. Sadly, Google and its relatives give us all a false sense of security and wisdom as we can search for something as elusive as "the truth" and Google delivers an answer in less than ten seconds. Enter "the truth" in Google, elect "I'm Feeling Lucky" and with little hesitation or needless strain or effort we have our answer."

An older but good blog post by Jaymie McKenzie that explores the wisdom we think we are getting when we totally rely on a search engine to deliver the 'answers' instead of activities that are more challenging and worthwhile.