As a science teacher, we’re always looking for new tools and strategies that will motivate, and help students learn science. Several days ago I introduced the idea of Science Teaching 3.0, and in that post suggested that there were parallel dimensions in consideration of globalization, the Earth, the Web. There was an interesting article at the CNN website about new search engines that have recently been developed, and indeed some that will be brought online in the near term. Most of us use Google when searching the Internet for information and links to relevant sites, and as we all know, a text-based list appears normally in less than a second.

But there is new generation of search engines that look to make searching the web more personal and visual. There were three in the article that I followed up on, and found them to be interesting. I hope you might find this discussion of some value to you.

Although Google remains the most used search engine, I examined three new search engines. Three that I examined were:

Search Engines: Hakia, Twine & Searchme

• Seachme
• Hakia
• Twine

To examine them, I compared the results when I searched the Internet for “asteroids” with the results I got on Google. I’ve used visuals below that you can use to make comparisons. I think you will like the “searchme” tool because it is the most visual of the search engines, and I think for many of our students, this tool will be very appealing. Here are the results.

Google: You will get about 6,480,000 hits for “asteroids” on google. Top of the list was Wikipedia’s site on asteroids.

First page of a search for asteroids on google.

Searchme: NASA’s “solar system” website comes up first, which “asteroid highlighted. But notice that you visually see the full webpages, and you can scroll through them. Just click on the page, and you are there. A real winner for visual learners.

What you see when you search for asteroids on searchme.

Hakia: When I searched asteroids on Hakia, the Wikipedia page for asteroids came up first. But note that there are some interesting navigation bars, including “images,” which will lead you page upon page of images about asteroids.

Page that appears when you search asteroid on the search engine, hakia.

Twine: Visual and text information result when you search on Twine. But, as with the other search engines, there are ways to make your work more personal and visual. Look at the last side navigation list.

Results for search for asteroids on Twine.