Guest author Larry Ferlazzo

Original post here and Larry’s blog here.

So many excellent search engines have opened-up for business since I published last year’s The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners — 2007, and I expect that trend to continue. I’ve been trying to keep that list updated, as I do for all of my “The Best…” lists. However, I decided to make this one the first I completely “re-did.”

So this list will include some, but not all, of the ones on last year’s list, along with new ones that have begun during the past year. I’d encourage you to look at the previous list, though, since you might find the ones that didn’t make it here still useful.

Here are my picks for The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners:

Number eight is a tie between two search tools that are trying to implement the ideas behind a “semantic” search engine that would understand questions written by users more accurately.  So, if you ask a question (Who is the governor of California? What is a Roman gladiator?) instead of just showing you a bunch of links where you can find the answer to the question, it will show the answer itself. They both did pretty well in my experiments. One is the recently updated Ask.com and the other is called True Knowledge. The second one isn’t quite yet open to the public, but if you go to their site I believe you can get an invitation to try it out quickly (Microsoft’s Live Search announced on October 31st that they were going to expand a similar feature called “instant answers” within a month, so it might be worth checking them out in a couple of weeks).

Number seven is the Sortfix Search Engine. I think it’s too complicated to explain here, but you can read my original post. It might also end up being too complicated for English Language Learners, but it’s intriguing enough to be worth a look.

Number six is the Carrot search engine. It returns search results divided into themes. For example, I typed in “Roman Gladiator” and, in addition to getting a list of typical results from a search engine, I saw a listed of thematic categories. These included “Ancient Rome,” “Movie Gladiator,” and “Collectible Swords.” These themes, I think, will be helpful to English Language Learners as they try to get through all the “clutter” of search engine results.

Number five is Quintura. It provides search results in a visual “cloud.” I’d characterize it as similar to the present version of KartOO, the well-known search engine, but much less confusing.

Number four is Boolify,  a new search engine designed for elementary and middle school students that is accessible to English Language Learners. I think there are others that are more accessible, but this is a good one to help teach basic search strategies.

Number three is Viewzi, a new visual search engine. In other words, it shows search results in images instead of just text. This feature is obviously beneficial to English Language Learners. But Viewzi does much more than this — in fact, there are so many choices of how you want your search results displayed that it could be confusing to students, and there’s certainly not enough space to explain it all here. It’s worth a look, though, and definitely deserves a spot on this list.

Number two is Middlespot. It’s sort of a combination Search Engine and a little bit of a social bookmarking application. After you enter your search term and click “enter,” your search results appear both as images and short text blurbs. Obviously, showing these screenshots benefit English Language Learners, and several other search engines I’ve listed here and on my website under Search Engines have this feature. The unique tool offered by Middlespot is called a “workpad.” You can drag-and-drop the webpages you want onto your workpad, give it a title, and then Middlespot will give your workpad its own url that you can post on a blog or online journal, or email to someone else.

And now, my choice for the number one Best Search Engine For ESL/EFL Learners is… Search Me. It’s an excellent search engine that, like others on this list, shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners. In addition, though, you can now create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher. You can also write some kind of description, or tag, for each site. The primary difference between Search Me and Middlespot is that Search Me also includes the ability to collect and tag images and videos, and has a much more attractive interface.

Your thoughts?  Feel free to leave Larry a comment!