Search+Tips+and+Tricks

Let's keep it simple:

1. **Gurus:** None of us can ever keep up with everything so one of the best things to do is to learn who does do that full time and then use his/her work to keep us posted, whether through RSS feeds or simply regular checking in to their websites.

Pam Berger is a search engine guru. [] and her links in her Google And Beyond (hmmm...I sort of used that title...must be more careful) piece is worth looking at. []

Kathy Schrock is a former Cape Cod librarian who culls and chooses the best websites, sorted by subject as well as specific teacher-aimed stuff like rubric sites etc. []

2. **Portals:** A portal is a really well-organized entry to a set of links and resources. What's good for us is that quality is easy to assess since it tends to be consistent within the portal sites and someone's gone to a lot of trouble to do this for us.

Try this one portal to ALL Government docs. [] It's important to figure out how to maneuver within this huge site but well worth the trouble. Notice you can have A-Z access if you know the agency you're interested in (NASA for astronomy for example) as well as a search space. We should know that in that MORE AUDIENCES taskbar, there's entry to a Teachers and Educators section. []

And if you hunted around enough, you might find the Library of Congress [] where we'll again find a special section for teachers [] and you CANNOT teach about American culture and history without the American Memory site []

And the National Archives at [] where sure enough there's a teacher's section. Aren't they good to us? []

3. **There's another search engine?? Really??** There are some new ideas in search engines that we can use, especially with kids who might find more support and a more visual format easier to use. Take a look at Clusty [] and Kartoo [] (which is a metasearch engine...that means it searches other search engines...) and Microsoft would love you to peak at Bing []

4. **Advanced ....whatever:** Basically all search engines also have Advanced capabililties and hardly any adults and no kids use them. So go to Google and just click on Advanced and see how, if you limit the search to the DOMAIN NAME.... .edu....you get entirely different (and perhaps more useful) results. Using ORG or GOV can be interesting and all of these mean immediately eliminating .com and, in general most porn sites. That's always good.. In response to the whole 2.0 world, Google continues to build their empire and now there's also the whole suite of tools such as Google for Teachers [] and if you're doing more serious research, Google Scholar [] (CAK)