Compare Google searches with Thumbshots.com Ranking
October 31, 2008
Many teachers worry about their students’ reliance on Google as a way of finding information. If you can’t get them to become library junkies, you can at least prove to them that how they do research affects what information they find. A neat little visualization tool called Thumbshots.com Ranking can help.The Ranking tool allows you to compare searches on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines by displaying a row of dots representing web pages, arranged in the same order that they appear in a particular set of search results. Hovering over a dot will show you a small preview, or “thumbshot,” of the page. One thing you’ll quickly see is that there’s not much overlap: pages that show up in Google results often don’t show up in Yahoo! results and vice versa.
Pages that do show up in both sets of results are highlighted in blue, and blue lines allow you to compare where the pages rank in each set of results. In the Yahoo! results for “water on Mars,” for instance, a 2001 article published on NASA’s website ranks 3rd; the same page ranks only 35th in Google’s results. The Ranking tool also allows you to highlight a particular site so that you can see, for instance, where Wikipedia is in each set of results. Moreover, you can teach your students about the importance of search words by showing them that searching Google for “water on Mars” returns significantly different results than searching Google for “Mars water.”
Once you’ve constructed and conducted a lesson whose moral is “Different searches produce different results,” you might want to explore any number of different search engines. Metasearch engines such as Dogpile and Clusty are search engines of search engines that compile results from several different sources. Search engines such as Grokker, Cuil, and Mahalo display information in dramatically different ways from the big three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search). There’s a whole world to search out there, and a whole bunch of ways to search it. –AMANDA FRENCH
Related links
Instructifeature: Five tips to improve students’ information evaluation
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