Customized Search Results
If you could customize the search results for your class searches would you do it? How would you tweak the results? Would you select a list of sites to search? Specify sites that should get preferred listing? A list of sites to leave out of the search?
Google’s Custom Search allows such customization. With Custom Search you can make a number of modifications to the search process you direct your students to use. Educational users may also opt out of displaying Google Ads on their results page.
This is a great opportunity to pare down search results for specific projects or younger researchers just learning their way around mainstream search tools. I am not suggesting the use of Google Custom Search in lieu of teaching students to use the real-world web, but rather as a chance to make searches better for specific situations.
The example here will search all of the ESC’s pages, even though we have content hosted on at least three servers at two different locations.
(As of publication time, Google still isn’t indexing new content on the ESC website very well, so the results aren’t likely to be complete or current. This is not problem with the Custom Search tool itself.)
The URL for your custom site is less than pretty, so I would recommend linking to it from your classroom website (or Progress Book).
For a more detailed explanations see the Google Custom Search site or see Read/Write Web’s writeup, Google Custom Search: Setting the Bar for Vertical Search Engines. Thanks to Jim Vincent at SPARCC for passing along a heads-up on the education application of this tool.
