Thursday, March 26, 2009

FOCUSED INTERNET SEARCHES

Goodbye Google, Hello Delicious and Diigo!

Recently, in staff development workshops, I’ve been sharing “FOCUSED SEARCHING” with teachers. Instead of doing internet searches using Google, I’ve been searching for the same topics in Delicious and Diigo and getting focused and relevant results.

For instance, during a workshop demonstration, I searched for “ Six Traits” in Google and got over 11,000,000 results.

The same search in Delicious found 247 results and Diigo netted 22 results.

The main point here is that “Focused Searching” through social bookmarking tools reveals sites that actual people are using, versus just searching for the occurrence of a word or phrase regardless of context.

Another reason to celebrate Social Bookmarking!

2 comments:

  1. I have found that bookmark diving (that's what I call it!) has been the most efficient way to discover usable resources (outside of Twitter). Google searches are often biased by those companies which sponsor the page. I love that you can see the number of users that tag specific sites too; that can be a great indicator of how useful the site truly is.

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  2. What a great idea, Mike. I'm going to try this.

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