Computer and Library Learning (Archived)

On November 7, 2012,
the blog post Search
Engines and Research: Where Do Students and Teachers Draw the Line? ended
with a pledge to “explore a search engine that teachers do not mind students
using for research purposes.” Let us take a look at Sweet Search, produced by Dulcinea Media Inc.  Sweet Search is described as “a Search Engine for Students”
that searches only 35,000 websites that have been approved and evaluated by
Dulcinea Media’s staff of librarians, research experts, and teachers during the
creation of content on the companion resource findingDulcinea. Search results are
evaluated and “fine-tuned” on an ongoing basis by increasing the search engine
results’ page (SERP) rankings of websites from institutions such as the Library
of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS, and universities.

The findingDulcinea blog published an
article on February 1, 2010 entitled Why
SweetSearch Is the Best Search Engine for Students . The article used “War
of 1812” as the example search and focused on results generated by Bing, Google,
and Sweet Search
respectively. Bing and Google ranked Wikipedia (the free, donation-seeking,
volunteer-run, online encyclopedia) at the top of the first search engine
results page (SERP) listed results from the Library of Congress and the
National Archives in the United States at the top of the first SERP. Bing and
Google also listed Warof1812.ca and Warof1812.net high up the list of search
results probably due to the nature of the domain names rather than the people
writing for the websites whose credentials are not known. However, in fairness,
other websites with good quality information such as the Canadian
Encyclopedia, the Archives
of Ontario, and the Government of Canada’s
War of 1812 website also figured prominently in the Bing or Google
searches.

What do others have
to say about Sweet Search? Toronto-based teacher Meg Hickman and her librarian
husband Peter Marques noted in a March
6, 2010 post on their blog Meg’s
Notebook: Digital Learning and Education Blog that they found the
accompanying Sweet Search directory (of recommended websites) called Sweet Sites to be useful as it
was divided into Students and Teachers’ categories and further sub-divided into
high school, middle school, and elementary school levels. Hickman and Marques
recommended checking out findingDulcinea
and Guide
to Web Search. Teachers can also register free for Finding Education as a means for
finding and sharing online resources and developing internet-based assignments
for students. The one drawback to using Sweet Search and its related resources from
a Canadian perspective, according to Hickman and Marques, was the emphasis on
strong American content.

The Libraries
and Learning Blog of the National
Library of New Zealand evaluated Sweet Search in a
November 17, 2011 post. In addition to making it easier to find primary sources,
Sweet Search uses an integrated tool that highlights relevant keywords to
facilitate access to relevant information as well as the means to save or share
results by bookmarking or email, to Google
Docs, with EasyBib’s citation
generator or alternatively, Diigo or Evernote, or to a social bookmarking service
such as Delicious. The NLNZ reviewer
attempted a variety of New Zealand keywords and phrases with good results with
the ability to filter by date to narrow the results’ list.

I used Sweet Search
on some Canadian topics. Searching T.
C. Douglas (or, alternatively Tommy
Douglas, CBC’s The
Greatest Canadian) brought up highly-ranked search items from sources such
as the Canadian Encyclopedia, National Film Board,
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the
U.S. National Library of Medicine National
Institutes of Health.

For another topic
relevant to the education curriculum, I searched Canada’s
trading partners on Sweet Search. Apart from the resources listed on
findingDulcinea, Sweet Search ranked sources highly from the CBC, Japan’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the CIA’s World
Factbook, and China Daily in addition to a two-page PDF document from 2005 from
Pearson Education Canada entitled “Who
are Canada’s Trading Partners?”, and two hits from the Writing Den on the website
actDEN.com, ACT360 Solutions’ Digital Education Network based
in Richmond, British Columbia.

Now compare the Sweet
Search results to the corresponding Google Canada search for Canada’s
trading partners. Wikipedia ranked first with Canada
and Its Trading Partners-Pathfinder on Toronto Public Library’s KidsSpace
ranking second.  A PDF document entitled “Who
is Canada’s largest trading partner?” placed third (This PDF was linked to
the website CraigMarlatt.com. An
examination of the website revealed that Craig Marlatt is a teacher based in
the Province of Ontario.). Next in the website ranking was Canada
and its trading partners, an E-STAT lesson plan on the Statistics Canada
website, followed by Canada
and Its Trading Partners on another teacher-established website called LinktoLearning.com. Various hits from
the Government of Canada’s websites (including the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade) followed next on the Google Canada results’
list. Then one saw hits from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Writing Den that Sweet Search had ranked higher up its results’ list. Using
Sweet Search and Google Canada in tandem highlighted some website sources on
which I might have otherwise missed out.

Students should give
Sweet Search a try if they have not already done so. That does not mean giving
up the use of Bing, Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines. Just do not
rely on one or two search engines for all of your internet research results.
Also, do not discount other information sources such as research databases available through
Toronto Public Library with a valid library card. And, librarians and library
assistants at various Toronto Public Library branches are available to offer
assistance and advice with research queries that might require the use of
different information sources – print, electronic, web-based etc.

(See also: Search Engines and Research: Where Do Students and
Teachers Draw the Line?)