Omnivorous Surfer

Did you know that Google will let you build a custom search engine? Instead of searching the entire web, you can create a search engine that will search only the sites you want it to and exclude any sites you choose. How useful would THAT be in a classroom sometimes? For example, if you want students to access only primary resources, you could create a custom search engine that would limit their results to sites you have identified that have primary resources. You could create an engine that would search only credible science sites for your science class. There are lots of ideas for using this.

I quickly put together a custom engine to search for videos. I did not include youtube, since so many schools have it blocked, but you'll see from the number of results that there are still plenty of resources without it.

You can embed your custom engine on a webpage, as the one below, but it will also have its own URL; here's mine: Carolyn's Video Search Engine

To create your own custom search engine, begin by putting together your list of sites, and then go to http://www.google.com/cse/ to start. You can also use the more link at the top of the Google search page, choosing even more at the bottom of the drop-down list, to get to the page to create your custom engine.