Fun & Exciting Stuff

I have found the blog, ReadWriteWeb to be helpful with off the beaten path technological information. One of the most interesting things from them has been this post on alternative search engines. Their winner for top alt. search engine is a site called GoshMe.

In my opinion, GoshMe is nothing short of amazing. When you go to Google and type in, for example, “coffee,” you get 197,000,000 results. When you go to one of the Metasearch engines on the List (Dogpile, mamma, gnosh, PlanetSearch, et al) you still get millions of web Pages, but they are collated from a number of different search engines. GoshMe searches across a variety of specialized search engines and databases, and for the above “coffee” example it returned about 1,200 search engine options – each one of which might have 197,000,000 results! GoshMe results are categorized and have the option to be filtered further.

GoshMe is not a metasearch engine, but I like to think of it as a Meta-Meta-Search Engine – an entire magnitude of searching above what searchers are used to. If you are prompted to register for the Beta version, go right ahead – it’s no big deal. Try a few searches to get the feel of the results.

Try it out and see what you think.

I finally broke down and downloaded Google Earth. What a great resource! As a history teacher who is constantly pulling down the maps on rollers over the board to demonstrate where something is, to be able to visually zoom into and show a 3-D model of a place is fabulous.  You can include different overlays that show different statistics, like crime stats for cities. You can bring up government data like House members and it shows an outline of their district.

Every history teacher should have this on their desktop.

The best part: It’s a free download.