Search Engines for Students

Here is a great list of search engines made by Mr. Byrne and found on Free Technology for Teachers. Unlike teachers in the USA, I don’t think teachers in Norway are too concerned about students stumbling across inappropriate materials. I think we are mostly concerned with the sources they find and how reliable they are. I try to tell my students to use at least 2 different sources, I encourage 3. Below you will find some great search engines to show your students. You might want to try it when researching and planning your lessons.

Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area),

Ref Seek is a search engine designed for academic use. Ref Seek seems to eliminate the advertising and paid links found on Google, Ask, Yahoo, and other commercial search engines. Ref Seek’s intention is to serve only search results that are academic in nature. The difference between Ref Seek and a generic Google search lies lower than the top results in search returns. As you compare search results between Ref Seek and Google you will find that the second and third pages of search results on Ref Seek contain results that seem to be more “academic” than what is found on the second and third pages of a generic Google search.
Wolfram Alpha is billed as a computational search engine and this is exactly what it does. If students have any questions involving numbers, Wolfram Alpha is the place to go. Wolfram Alpha can be used for other searches, but it’s not nearly as useful for general inquiries as it is for computational questions.
Google Scholar is one of Google’s lesser-known tools. Google Scholar is a search engine designed to search scholarly journals, Supreme Court records, and patent records. In some cases the results will link to abstracts of books and articles that you will then have to obtain from a library or book retailer. In other cases results will link to fully viewable documents.