Two New Search Options

Two good new search options came my way through RSS today:

From Free Technology for Teachers  - Database for Award-Winning Children's Literature.  It offers a variety of search options including genre, gender of protagonist, age ranges from baby to 14+, historical period, publication date range, and language.  Click the image for a better view of the search options.

From Joyce Valenza's NeverEndingSearch blog - SweetSearch for students.  Every web site has been evaluated by their research experts.  There is a nice collection of links organized by subject and level in the Web Links section.

Advanced Search Options

Beyond Basics

Often when I’m asked, “How did you find that?” it’s because I went straight for the Advanced Search option.  These types of searches are available everywhere from online databases to Twitter.  Using Advanced Search options can save you a great deal of time and frustration.

Google’s advanced search lets you include or exclude terms without ever having to use that scary word, Boolean.  Mention Boolean searching to students or staff and you’ll often get a ‘can’t spell it, can’t pronounce it, ergo it must be difficult’ kind of reaction.

Twitter Search

Using the Advanced Search options allows you to search for specific words or phrases, to search for tweets from or to a specific person.  You can narrow your search to specific places, dates and even by attitude: positive or negative. 

Flickr

Flickr’s Advanced Search is the first place I head for finding Creative Commons licenced images.  I know there are other ways to do this in Flickr but I prefer the results I get from using the Advanced Search option. 

YouTube

Using Advanced Options in YouTube let’s you filter out videos that may not be suitable for minors, include/exclude terms, search by type or show only results that have annotations or closed captions.  You can search within categories, by language and date, or by duration: short, medium or long. I was able to filter out all the cartoons videos in a search for a short clip to introduce a class to the topic of bears.  The results returned were from FirstScience TV, National Geographic and BBC Worldwide.

Comp Fight Searching

I read about a better way to search flickr over at ReadWriteWeb today. It's called Comp Fight and I was very impressed. I'll be checking there first when I want an image for my blog. RRW does a great job of explaining the features Comp Fight has to offer. I loved the way Comp Fight displays image thumbnails which saved me a lot of scrolling. The images were so intriguing it made me want to come up with blog posts just to use them.

Image thanks to Leonardo Cardoso
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leocardoso/1817887009/sizes/m/
Found using Comp Fight