The end of summer is a good time to tune up your research skills, especially with students returning to school.
But despite popular perception, Google isn't always the best place to learn about a new subject online. For one thing, its results can be formulaic. You'll get ads on top, then news stories, often shopping sites and usually a link to the Wikipedia, all on the first page of results. Then you're plunged into pages of hits ranked by Google's search algorithms.
A properly crafted Google search is a major part of the information hunt, but you should also be aware of alternatives.
SweetSearch caught my eye because, instead of ranking Web pages by how other pages are pointing to them, this search engine goes after primary sources and other credible sites, such as university library collections and public data repositories. Search here and you're working in a universe of checked, verifiable sources and solid information.
SweetSearch ( www.sweetsearch.com) grows out of another site, findingDulcinea ( www.findingdulcinea.com), which has since 2006 been creating topic-based guides for high-quality material. In that time, tens of thousands of websites have been judged reliable by librarians and teachers who have worked to compile this information, and the SweetSearch engine hunts within this subset of the total Internet when you give it a search task.
Google or Bing may find many of the same sites, but what I've noticed is that some of the better sites for a particular topic wind up deep in their search results, often outranked by Web pages more commonly used but of inferior quality. When I compared Google and SweetSearch in a test search on the battle of Antietam, I found good information on both but was impressed with SweetSearch's focus on credible scholarship and emphasis on primary source materials.
Sometimes you're looking not for documents but for the latest information. Another search engine tackles that issue. It's Now Relevant ( www.nowrelevant.com), an offshoot of the Internet Time Machine project that is open for public testing. At its default setting, Now Relevant searches for content within the past five days, although you can move the adjustable slider to narrow that to as little as one day.
Anyone trying to keep up with breaking stories should find this a useful supplement to Google, which also makes options available for narrowing a search in time. But what I've found with Now Relevant is that I'm more likely to get stories on the subject I'm searching for than corporate and shopping information.
Enter Apple's iPad into Now Relevant, for example, and you get a selection of recent stories in newspapers, magazines and blogs about the product, compared with Google's broader mix, replete with Wikipedia, YouTube, and information for shoppers.
You can find much good information on Google, but students will find these targeted engines make the search faster by filtering out less useful material. So the best search strategy is to learn how to use the various switches and query refinements Google offers while keeping the alternative engines bookmarked. Using more than one search engine - and more than one page of search results - is the best way to weed out inferior sites.
Also interesting is the new browser add-on Apture ( www.apture.com), that brings quick search capabilities to any Web page. The plug-in lets you highlight a word on a given Web page and call up search results from Google and other sources without leaving the original page. A free plug-in, Apture works with Chrome,Firefox and Apple's Safari browser.
It's a reminder of how much innovation is still possible in a space dominated by big players such as Google and Microsoft.
