Academic Search Engines

Knowing how to search the internet for information is a very important skill that we should be teaching students from a young age. I remember in elementary school taking trips to the library and learning how to look up books using the computers or the card catalogs. Now, of course, you can find so much information simply through the internet, but it is important to know what information is true and what is not. People can post anything they want to the internet, so there is a lot of false research out there that others who do not know how to research on the internet begin to believe as truth. Because of this, we need to be teaching our students how to find reliable information via the internet and academic search engines are a way to do that.

Honestly, I knew very little about academic search engines before this assignment. While I do understand how to decide if a source is reliable or not, no one ever told me that you could use a different search engine to weed out all the non-reliable information that is out there. I can definitely see how using academic search engines can not only benefit my students, but also myself and many of my colleagues that are currently working on graduate degrees. In the classroom, I can see this really cutting down on students getting distracted from all the extra information that they can get when using normal search engines.

I started my quest of search engines with iSeek (picture below). What I really liked about this option for research was that on the left hand side you can select targets for what you want your search to be on. Some targets I was using included subject and grade level, but there are many more. I did not like the visual look of the site because I became overwhelmed by the descriptions of the resources that it found.

WolframAlpha (picture below) is a site that I have used in the past with my students when they are having trouble with math vocabulary. It is very helpful with the students because they know how to use it and can navigate it fairly easily. I will continue to use this site in my classroom with students.

Infotopia, AcademicIndex and Google Scholar (pictures below) are all powered by Google. I really liked what pulled up on all three of these when I searched for information on personalized learning. It was much better at recognizing exactly what I wanted to search for than iSeek was. Similar to these search engines, but not powered by Google is Microsoft Academic. 

The difference between Microsoft Academic (pictured below) and the Google powered options is that it also has the ability to select specific targets to your research like iSeek. I really enjoyed searching through these last few, but think that in the end I will probably stick with Google Scholar or Microsoft Academic because of ease of access and familiarity.