Answers.com - Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and much more
Answers.com - Online Dictionary, Encyclopedia and much more
Saw an article about by Walter Mossberg in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I though it related to our discussions on smarter search engines. The idea is to create a search engine that provides more than just links. The ideal goal is for a user to be able to interact with virtually every word or phrase that appears on the screen.
I tried a few sample searches. While it had relatively little to say on "digitality," it had a ton of information on "Boston." Neat. It still has links to google on the left margin in addition to a few other tools.
Santos
3 Comments:
Mark, I love this link! ...just sent it out to my 106 students. We've been working on attack skills for research, and I've been trying to escape the gravity of Google ... this is a great "other" quick search. Thanks!
11:03 AM
Hmmmmmm.... Mary's aligning "googling" and "gravity" is something of, well, a falling apple -- the kind that, perhaps, plunks Newton on the head :-)
It is interesting to consider search engines and what this means to the sense of "research."
Students, of course, are attracted to the relative ease of such engines, and as such their deployment is something of a commonplace in assignments.
In part, there is something of a disappointment in the "quality" of the research such searches elicit. But, too, there is something exciting about just seeing what comes up in the sheer quanity of hits.
The writing instructor, of course, usually takes the side of quality, whereas students are excited by the (aleatory) quantity. Indeed, such quantity might be said to be vital to the student, because it's sheer ease often sends instructors reeling, and the students can use vertible MOUNTAINS of material to discover what MOLEHILLS the instructor *really* wants.
Isn't this the case.less? Don't instructors often have relativity tight niches that would be *nice* if students would focus on... Isn't there something concentrated in a molehill?
Later students can make mountains out of molehills.
But with Google the situation is somewhat reversed: Students Move Mountains. Of course, WHAT to do with it is too difficult for either the instructor or student *really* to know. Instructors keep trying to get students to go to the library, which for all its vastness somehow seems more (academically) familiar...
All this complicated, of course. What experiences have others had in this regard? If I make a mountain out of a molehill here, it is out of a sense of playfulness for what I think is a provocative issue that Mary alludes to... If I play, it is out of a shared sense of frustration at the GRAVITY that Mary seems to allude to...
...oh, on a passing note, last semester one of the engineering students was fond of talking about a good academic experience he had that drew him to ENGineering... Evidently one of his calculus instructor was fascinated by who had a stronger claim to the discovery of calculus, Newton or Leibniz...
Interesting to think of one of the commonplace images of gravity as stemming from Newton, rather than Leibniz... just a tangent, but then tangents... convergences... divergences... All this is a zigzag sense that is rather unlike the straight drop of the apple to the top of one's noggin...
2:16 PM
Jeff's insight on quality vs. quantity definately seems to apply to Jeremy's post on EPIC...
5:50 PM
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