Power Searching

ASLA NSW has recently offered a series of after school workshops on a range of topics. Yesterday, I attended their workshop on Power Searching which I found really worthwhile.

There were a variety of points explored in the workshop (I pinched these points from the workshop handout):

• Power searching with Google
• Search engines that don't start with G
• The invisible web - what has changed, what is new
• Creating your own RSS, web clipping tools, and power research tools
• Seting up a search engine for specific information needs

I found this workshop incredibly valuable as I am a chronic Google user, and was amazed to see what else was out there for us as educators to utilise. (I must admit, I am still addicted to Google and all its delightful products). Even so, it really gave me some food for thought.

My favourite applications that I learned about were:

• Pageflakes - a social, personalised homepage
• Quintura - an interactive, visual search engine
• Librarian's Index to the Internet - a searchable, annotated directory of Internet sources selected and evaluated by librarians covering a wide range of subjects
• Incy Wincy - a search engine for the Invisible web

There was so much more that we could have explored, but as it was an after school workshop it was really only a taster of what is out there.

*EDIT February 2009: June Wall has just written an article for Scan based on the Power Searching workshop that she presented. You can access that article here.*