Teaching for Information Literacy

Visual Search Engines

Standard search engines are great for finding individual Web pages to answer specific questions. But their results lists do not help you to understand a field in general. A visual search engine clusters results, and in doing so gives you a better overview of a field. These are useful tools that can be used to help students narrow and focus their searches.

• VisuWords - online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

• Quintura for Kids

After you enter your search query, you are presented with a tag cloud of words that looks like a just-finished Scrabble game. Moving your cursor to the word that most closely matches what you are looking for causes the to cloud to rearrange around that term. You glide though the Internet this way, until you have ’steered’ yourself to the best results; even if its something you did not know was there when you began your search.

There are other visual search tools including searchChrystal , Grokker , Clusty and KartOO - the following articles provide a review and a comparison of each.

• Five weird ways to see search: Quintura, Clusty, and more

• Slow, but very pretty searching with SearchCrystal

My favourite of the search engines reviewed is Quintera - the adult search engine. It was the least confusing to view and to follow. I quite like the way it which it displayed the results for the term on which I hovered almost immediately on the right hand side of the page.