Reprint: Searching For Google Alternatives

Note: This article was originally published on May 18, 2012 on Technology Integration in Education, where I am Blogs Editor and Featured Blogger

Like many technology-focused educators, I find my life these days to be full of Google. My employers are Google Apps schools, and I'm currently working towards my qualifications in Google Apps training. Generally, I'm a huge fan of Google products, and I constantly work with my teachers to blend them into their instruction. Google Sketchup, Earth, Maps, Apps, Reader - all of these products are at the top of my EdTech toolbox.

The Google brand name, like Aspirin, Coke, Jello, Kleen-ex, or Bandaids, has become a synonym for the product that the company sells. "Google", as a verb, is now thrown around casually in everyday conversation by techies and Luddites alike.

Increasingly, however, we are hearing a chorus of voices concerned about a company that seems almost too ubiquitous, too far-reaching, too powerful to be trusted as the primary gatekeeper for all human knowledge. Still, we rarely hear much serious discussion about the alternatives to Google's core function of internet indexing and searching.

Search Engine Market Share: May 2012

SOURCE: http://www.karmasnack.com/about/search-engine-market-share/
 

Partly this can be attributed to the weakness of the other big players. Microsoft-owned Bing, generally acknowledged to be the #2 search engine, is similar to Google in many ways. It, too, is backed by an oft-criticized, monopoly-sized technology behemoth. It collects and sells surfing habits and personal information, and is following Google's lead towards a more social-based approach to surfing. It may offer a comparable service to Google, but very little to excite those looking for alternatives.

The other main player, Yahoo, has spent the last several years in a self-destruct sequence, and looks poised to join Excite, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, and a host of other search engines which slid into irrelevance after facing bankruptcy or restructuring, failed rebranding, or absorption by larger companies.

Whether we are talking about textbooks, testing, cafeteria food, or EdTech, educators need to look deeper than "what is most popular" when deciding what comes into the schoolhouse. We need to think about the consequences for our students and classrooms. We should critically examine all of the alternatives, and teach our students to do the same.  

Today, Google is the dominant search engine, with a host of other applications that benefit our classrooms. They should be enjoyed, exploited and celebrated. But for educators, the search for new and better strategies, tools and resources should be a constant, never-ending concern. So, why should we be so automatic in our impulse to Google something?

With that in mind, I thought I would investigate a few services which are not just Google-clones, or meta-searches aggregating results from the big players, but which endeavor to offer unique and interesting approaches to internet searching. 

My Favorite Google Alternatives
 

DuckDuckGo - DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from Google and the other major players in one important area: it doesn't collect, share, or store personal information in any way. It has perhaps the most strict and rigorous privacy policy of any search engine. It also offers a searching environment largely free of spam, sponsored results, or other advertising.  

Like the big players, it offers a number of tools and goodies that work right from the search bar - calculations, conversions, fact-searches and more.

In short, it has a lot of the functionality of Google, without a lot of the crap that concerns and annoys people. For this reason alone, it seems well-suited to a school setting.

Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a "computational knowledge engine".  In short, it specializes in returning results based on objective data, statistics and calculations. Their (rather ambitious) goal is to "provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."  Personally, I'm not really a number-crunching kind of guy - but Wolfram Alpha offers an impressive suite of inline statistical and calculation tools, and covers a vast variety of data sets (see some examples), which have many, many, potential applications across the curriculum. For math and science teachers particularly, this could be an incredibly useful tool.

NowRelevant solves a problem with the basic Google search that I personally find constantly annoying - sorting through older links when looking for up-to-the-minute information.  NowRelevant only returns results that are two weeks old or less, and with a simple scrub bar you can quickly narrow your search down to the last 24 hours. I know that Google Advanced Search offers the ability to filter results by time, but for a quick search for the latest information, this engine is definitely useful. I'll be using it frequently from now on.

Million Short is a search engine based around another very interesting premise. It purposefully drops the first million most popular websites, and searches whatever is left. The idea is that popular does not always mean relevant, and that there are gems hidden in the "under-web" that most people never see - certainly not by relying on the first page of a Google search. If you find that dropping a million websites is a little too aggressive, you can adjust the filter to remove other levels as well (100K, 10K), or to search the entire web if you want. As a tool for exploring little-explored corners of the internet, it is very useful.  As an educator, I think it could be used to teach about search engines and illustrate various ways they control the information we are presented with. Lesson plan: students conduct web searches using Million Short, comparing the results they get as adjust the number of "popular" sites they are searching.  Reflect: Do the "popular" sites have anything in common? Are they really better, in terms of the information you are searching for?  What are the consequences of people using popularity-driven search engines to find information?