Smashing apps put me onto the search engine, Addictomatic: inhale the web. Ignore the fact that it sounds like a subliminal cigarette or gadget commercial, the results are actually quite impressive in breadth. Addictomatic searches the following:
Topix ‘is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city’. My result had ‘Melbourne, Australia’ as the locality.
Live.com news
Google Blog Search : find blogs on your favourite topics
Twitter search (search Twitter in real time; see what the world is doing now)
YouTube
Digg
New, images, video ; Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.
Flickr : photo sharing
Addicto Top Blogs
Bloglines (RSS aggregator)
Twingly Blog Search
Delicious Tags
Truveo Video Search – search video across the web including hit television shows, full-length movies, breaking news clips, sports highlights, music videos
Ask.com News
Blinkx Mainstream Vid News
The beta offering, dubbed Blinkx TV, captures and indexes video and audio streams directly from television and radio broadcasters to make available news, sports and entertainment clips.
Wikio is a personalizable news page featuring a news search engine that searches media sites, blogs and the contributions of Wikio members.
Technorati Blog search, breaking news, photos, and videos, on the latest headlines, business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sports, and technology.
Bloglines A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
WordPress.com
Yahoo Web Search
What’s useful? If you hover over the headline, you get the first sentence without opening up the website.
What do I think about this search engine? Based on a brief perusal, I think it’s better for big events in the news, eg. ‘Beijing Olympic Games’ or ‘Russia war Georgia’. If we’re looking at showing this to middle years students, I think it could be confusing, and they would need discussion to support navigation of hits. Teachers could find this resource useful for topics requiring current information in varied formats.
I think that new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe are more suited to middle years students, especially in their visual appeal and ease of navigation.
I do like the inclusion of blogs as an alternate source of information. I think their value is yet to be fully discovered by the general population. Teachers, take note. Once you start reading blogs, you’ll never look back. Never underestimate the collaborative power of information and opinion sharing.
Any other observations?
