Back to the Wall
Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2001
Have search tools for students improved? Four years ago, in "Lost and Found in Cyberspace" (March 1997, pp. 102-105), I lamented that there wasn't much on the Net useful for a fifth- or sixth-grader doing a report on the Great Wall of China. Several students in the library where I then worked had been asking me for sites on the Great Wall. But when I typed "Great Wall of China" into the search engines, I received hit pages filled with travel agencies, Chinese restaurants, and international adoption services. But a lot has happened on the Web in four years.
So let's take a look at a few of the myriad places students grades four and up can search--I wouldn't recommend that anyone younger search the Web. Let's look again for student-friendly resources on the Great Wall of China, and along the way, let's look for the best search tools. By "search tools" I mean any page intended to help you find the "good stuff," on the Web, from librarian-created directories of sites like KidsClick to purely software-driven search engines like Google. Over the last few years, we've seen a proliferation of new search tools (and the demise of a few, such as my onetime favorite: the late, lamented Hotbot).
Google: Google (www.google.com) is a search engine many librarians swear by, and with good reason. It gives users two search options; the first is a single box, into which I typed "Great Wall of China." Among my first 10 hits was "Secrets of the Great Wall" (www.discovery.com/stories/history/greatwall/greatwall.html) on the Discovery Channel site--a site ideal for students. Google also gives you an "advanced search" option. It lets you limit the language in which your hit pages are composed, search only U.S. government and university pages, and exclude words or phrases from the search (for example, I searched for the phrase "Great Wall of China" and excluded the words "restaurant" and "adoption"). Google also has a filtering option, but doesn't specify what it filters.
All the Web, All the Time: Fast Search, the company that runs All the Web, All the Time (www.alltheweb.com), claims to have a database of 575 million URLs--half the size of Google's--but it often finds sites other search tools don't. The first hit it returned was a good student site, Enchanted Learning Software's "About the Great Wall of China" (www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/greatwall), but the superior Discovery Channel site didn't appear at all. All the Web's Advanced Search page has more options than Google's, including a "domain filter" that lets you exclude all dot-com or dot-edu sites if you choose. There's also an "offensive content reduction" option, but like Google, it doesn't explain what it considers "offensive."
Searchopolis: Now let's take a look at a search tool designed specifically for use by young people. Searchopolis (www.searchopolis.com) lets the searcher select a desired grade level, so I requested hits suitable for sixth graders. The results were good: the Discovery Channel site came up first, and other sites followed with some excellent photographs of the Wall, such as NASA's page at www.jpl.nasa.gov/radar/sircxsar/gwall.html. Searchopolis is, as you might expect, filtered (although, again, we can only guess at what is filtered out). It's owned by N2H2, the company that makes BESS, one of the most popular filtering services. It includes a very nice advanced search page that allows you to include or exclude phrases, specify pages from specific continents or in specific languages, and even search for pages with specific Lexile scores.
KidsClick!: It may not be fair to lump the KidsClick! Web site directory (kidsclick.org), a heroic and mostly volunteer effort of librarians, with the big commercial search engines above, but that's what the kids will do. The three hits I received for "Great Wall of China" were only adequate, and the Discovery Channel site wasn't among them. KidsClick! has an advanced search page that allows you to locate sites in its database within a range of reading levels (such as grades 3-6) or the number of pictures, but its features don't compare to those of the commercial products. If only we could find a venture capitalist with a few million to fund its expansion...
After searching for the Great Wall again, I came away from my computer a far happier man than I'd been four years ago. Finding some great sites on the Wall involved almost no sweat at all. Now if I could only answer another question I was asked four years ago: "Is there a Web site with photos of Shakespeare?"
