Guest author Alice Mercer of Reflections on Teaching.

There are lot of web search options out there, and not a lot of money in school budgets. Given those two tensions, many districts are looking for ways to save money, and find more “free” options. One of the earliest online tools that my district purchased was NetTrekker, a web search service that provides reviewed web sites. My fellow Sac City teacher, Larry Ferlazzo, was asked by AltSearchEngines to look at NetTrekker vs. free alternatives, and asked for my input from an elementary perspective.

The Setup:

I did two searches: the word “Hmong” and “astronomy”. I used the Elementary page from NetTrekkerDI. To compare I used Google, Yahoo!Kids (a free kid friendly site), KidRex (promising a “Safe Search” version of Google), and MelZoo (which gives a screenshot preview of the page, great for helping kids figure out if the site is for them).

Background:

The two subjects I chose are ones that I have had the most experience, and trouble with getting good elementary sources for. I need information because fifth graders have a unit on astronomy and one on heritage, in their language arts anthology. Because my school has a large population of Hmong refugees, this is one of the subjects they need good information on. When I first started having students use online resources for reports 3-4 years ago, there were not a lot of resources on the Hmong people online no matter what search engine I used (NetTrekker or Google). The Hmong in the U.S. are largely refugees from Laos who assisted the U.S. during the war in Vietnam. When the Communist government took over, many fled to refugee camps in Thailand. Because they initially clustered in their settlement in the U.S., they had large numbers in three areas (Minneapolis, Fresno, and Sacramento), but their overall population in the U.S. was small. In general, resources on the Web for social sciences, especially things like culture and sociology were not great (most of the first adopters were “hard” sciences, and the materials available online for those subjects were more plentiful). In spite of that, in the past Google searches on science topics often led to pages more suitable for college rather than elementary students, which complicated searches about astronomy.

Findings on “Hmong” search term:

What a difference a couple years can make! There are many more resources available online for this search term. They range from Wikipedia, to hub resources, to Web pages from elementary students with good basic information. There are differences between the results on all of the search engines. Even MelZoo which gives a visual version of Google searches, has some slight variation in what it returns on the front page, and the KidRex search results seemed to be for “Hmong” and “Children” returning a very different set of results skewed towards child development among the Hmong.

Here are the links:

· hmong – Google Search

· Yahoo! Kids : Search Results “hmong”

· MelZoo – Web results for “hmong”

· hmong – KidRex

• This is a link to bookmarks for the first page of the results returned from my NetTrekker search, the number indicates the order it appeared in the results.

I think the lesson from this search is to have kids use more than one search engine. I often create links with search terms, like the ones above, to get kids started on projects. Between even two of the non-NetTrekker options, your students will end up getting almost all of the pages listed on NetTrekker, and some other resources besides.

Findings on “astronomy” search term:

I used to prefer NetTrekker for science topics because a Google search would return a lot of esoteric articles that were just bound to confuse. This is no longer true, but there are still differences. Astronomy is one of the few topics where a Google-based search returns something besides a Wikipedia page as the top result, in this case Astronomy.com was returned for all but NetTrekker and Yahoo!Kids. NetTrekker has two excellent sources, Ology, and KidsAstronomy.com, but have duplicate entries for the site going to obscure pages. The first search result takes you to a hangman game on Kids Astronomy, but there is no high level result for the entry page on the site. Ology, another great resource, has multiple entries. Yahoo!Kids had a similar random quality to it.

· astronomy – Google Search

· Yahoo! Kids : Search Results

· MelZoo – Web results for “astronomy”

· astronomy – KidRex

• This is a link to bookmarks for the first page of the results returned from my NetTrekker search, the number indicates the order it appeared in the results.

My thoughts, I got much better results from Google based search engines (Google and MelZoo) when I added the term “children” to “astronomy”. KidRex appeared to already do this.

Conclusions:

You don’t always get what you pay for. Much of what you get for a fee from NetTrekker for elementary students, can be obtained elsewhere simply by adding the term “children” to your search. There are other bells and whistles on NetTrekker, but some of them (the text to speech) do not work well with low memory computers, such as the ones in my lab. I think the visual previews (from free services like MelZoo) are more useful.

I’ve supported using it as one among many tools for students, but even then, I noted it’s limitations in not being as up to the minute on all subjects. In addition kids need to have a broad-based curriculum in using search engines, which includes:

• using Boolean operators (AND, OR, “-”)
• evaluating search result entries before going to the page
• evaluating search result entries after going to the page

NetTrekker attempts to make most of those lessons unnecessary. This is not a good thing for kids because they will be using Google, or similar tools in their real lives, by their own inclination now, and as adults.